‘How did you know that?’
‘I heard them talking too.’ She gave me a long steady look. ‘Maybe you should go. At least they might give you a decent last meal there.’
I lunged forward, putting all my weight and force into my muscles to shock her, swiping out with one paw. She darted back out of the way with a yowl, but I got close enough to know she was scared. ‘Get out of my garden,’ I barked. ‘And don’t come back.’
She dashed away, scaling the fence in a moment. Pausing on the top, she turned back and hissed down at me. ‘You mark my words. It won’t be your garden for very long.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said, but she was already gone, down over the fence and away to her own home, and Holly, and warmth and food.
I huddled down at the base of the tree and tried to get warm. ‘You’re wrong,’ I muttered to myself again. ‘They’re coming back for me.’
I just wished I could believe my own words.
Outside, the world at night was very different to my cosy bed inside number 11 Maple Drive.
As I huddled under the tree in the back garden, my paws around my head, I tried to sleep, to rest, but I couldn’t.
First, it was the noises keeping me awake. Strange, unfamiliar noises that I never heard during the day. Hoots and snaps and whistles and even a strange bark, that didn’t sound like any dog I’d ever met.
Then my stomach started to rumble.
Normally, inside, there’d be a little something in my bowl for me to snack on, just in case this happened. Oliver always made sure of it before he went to bed – even though I’d heard Daisy tell him not to, that I ate plenty during the day. (Surely, if I ate plenty during the day I wouldn’t be hungry during the night, right?) But Oliver wasn’t there. None of them were.
And I was outside.
Even Perdita had disappeared inside for the night. I thought about sneaking back in through her cat flap, but the fear of Holly finding me and calling the pound was too great. So instead, I stayed huddled at the base of Jay’s treehouse, wishing my family would come home.
It was the longest night ever.
Eventually, Jay and the twins were asleep, and even Bella was curled up with her Kindle in her room.
‘It’s kind of cool here, I suppose,’ Bella had said doubtfully when Daisy stopped by to tuck her in, even though she was fourteen and convinced she didn’t need it. ‘Dusty, but cool.’
‘I suppose.’ Daisy had perched on the end of her bed. ‘But you’d rather be home for Christmas, wouldn’t you?’
Bella had given her best ‘how did you survive so long being this dumb’ look and said, ‘Well, yeah.’
Which was pretty much how Daisy felt about the situation too. And that feeling only grew when her father took her on a tour of the chateau.
‘And down here, we have the wine cellar! Mind the steps, though, there’s a few missing.’
‘Of course there are,’ Daisy muttered, as she followed him into the cellar, testing each step before she put any weight on it. ‘Dad, do you really think this chateau is the best place for you? I mean, at your time of life?’
‘Careful, Daisy. That could almost count as being ageist.’ Dad pulled a filthy light pull and a bare bulb lit up above them. ‘Now, where did I put that nice bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape? Seems appropriate, no?’
‘Very. And I’m not being ageist.’ Just realistic. ‘This place would be a huge challenge for anybody. It could take decades to get it into shape.’
‘Are you implying we don’t have decades left?’
Daisy sighed, and bit back on the impulse to remind her dad that he was already sixty-nine and had had two heart attacks in the last five years. ‘I hope you have much, much longer, Dad, you know that. I’m just not sure why you’d want to spend them over here, so far from your family, trying to keep this place from falling down around your ears.’
‘But, darling, don’t you think it’s romantic?’ her mum asked, from halfway down the stairs behind her. Great. One of them she might have been able to reason with. But both of them … impossible. It was like the crazy fed off each other. And where was Oliver? Why wasn’t he helping her with this conversation?
Probably because his parents were perfectly ordinary pensioners, and very happy with their semi in the suburbs. He never had known how to deal with her parents. Of course, neither had she, really. If she had, maybe she could have stopped this crazy plan before it got as far as needing passports to visit. And possibly hard hats.
‘Romantic?’ Daisy asked, thinking about the four poster bed upstairs. ‘I suppose it has its charms, but really …’
‘Not the building! The adventure!’ Mum skipped down the steps like a woman half Daisy’s age, avoiding the missing step without a problem. ‘That’s what we wanted! A big project for me and your dad to take on together. To bring us closer, now we’re both retired.’
Ah. Suddenly this was all starting to make more sense. ‘To bring you closer together?’ she asked, sceptically. ‘Or was it more because you didn’t know what to do with yourselves once you were both rattling around at home together?’
Her parents exchanged a look, and Daisy knew she’d hit the nail on the proverbial head. ‘You were bored, weren’t you?’ she guessed. ‘You were bored, and tetchy, and bickering, and you couldn’t just take up ballroom dancing like everyone else’s parents.’
‘Your father has two left feet,’ Mum pointed out. ‘Besides, this is much more exciting.’
Daisy leant against the wall of the wine cellar and tried to figure out how her life had come to this. As if wrangling four children wasn’t enough, now she had to do it for her parents as well.
‘Although, I have to admit, there is rather more work involved than the advertisement led us to believe,’ Dad said.
‘Let me guess. You found an advert for a real, French chateau in the back of one of the Sunday papers, right? What did it say? In need of some refurbishment?’
Mum sniffed. ‘It said – perfectly accurately, you have to admit – that it was ripe and ready for some dedicated couple to put their stamp on it.’
‘That it is,’ Daisy conceded. ‘So they didn’t mention the crumbling plaster or the fact that the ceiling is missing in the second sitting room?’
‘Not exactly,’ Dad said. ‘No. It didn’t mention the
collared doves that keep flying down through the chimney in the kitchen, either.’
‘Or the bats.’ Daisy shuddered.
‘But it was a bargain,’ Mum argued. ‘Really, Daisy, they were practically giving it away.’
‘I can’t imagine why.’ Probably the previous owners just wanted to get out before the whole place collapsed around their ears.
Time to try reason and logic. Admittedly, they’d never worked with her parents before, but there was a first time for everything. ‘Look, we’re going to have to go back for Claude tomorrow, as long as we can get space on the ferry. Why don’t you come with us? We can all have Christmas together at Maple Drive. Where we’re less likely to be brained by falling battlements.’
‘Daisy,’ Dad said sternly.
‘Did I say that last part out loud? Sorry. It’s been a very long day.’ She tried to smile encouragingly. ‘All I’m saying is, if things aren’t quite ready here for guests, that’s fine. We need to head home anyway. And you’re very welcome to join us.’
There was silence as her parents had one of those silent conversations involving hand gestures and facial movements that they’d always done whenever they were pretending not to argue in front of her when she was a child. God, she did that with Oliver now, didn’t she? She really was turning into her mother. Except her mother had only had one child to deal with. That was practically cheating.
‘Well, maybe,’ Mum said, eventually. ‘We’ll think about it.’
‘And see if the oven blows again next time we try to use it,’ Dad added.
‘That might be the deciding factor,’ Mum admitted.
‘That or one of those blasted doves pooing on my head again,’ Dad grumbled.
‘Great,’ Daisy said, wishing she felt brighter about it than she did. ‘I’ll call the ferry company.’
All she needed now was six places – and two baby spaces – for the only ferry home on Christmas Eve. The fully booked only ferry home.
How hard could that be?
‘Season of miracles,’ she muttered under her breath, as she climbed back out of the cellar, almost falling through the gap in the stairs. ‘And, Dad? Bring the wine.’