House of Longing by Tara Calaby

Author:Tara Calaby [Tara Calaby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2023-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Christmas Day at Kew was not the cosy celebration of Charlotte’s memories, but it was pleasant and peaceful nonetheless. There was a short religious service at the chapel in the morning and, although it was a Wednesday, the women were excused from work. The midday meal was more jovial than usual. The long-term patients made an effort to ensure that the newer women didn’t feel alone, and there were fat-roasted potatoes and large serving dishes full of carrots and turnips and buttery pumpkin that was as smooth as cream in Charlotte’s mouth. Several geese from the farm had been sacrificed for the festivities, the rich meat a delicacy compared to the usual asylum fare of beef and mutton.

Charlotte ate until she could eat no more, and then a fruitcake was brought out from the kitchen and she found the strength to eat a slice of that as well. It was not as rich as the cakes that Charlotte had been used to—a little short on currants and peel—but it was sweet and fresh from the oven, and Charlotte thought it tasted just as good as the Twelfth Night cakes she had eaten in the past.

Since her mother’s death, Charlotte had spent Christmas alone with her father, so she was not accustomed to the great feasts remembered by some of her fellow patients. Her Christmas meals had been more sensible—ham, usually, and beans and potatoes, and a dense plum pudding loaded with dried fruit and heavily spiced. This Charlotte baked herself. She was not a natural cook and, indeed, could make only simple things. While Mrs Bunton had taught Charlotte enough of the basics to fit her for marriage, at least in her father’s eyes, she considered the kitchen her realm, and only reluctantly allowed Charlotte in when the business of cooking was going on. The annual Christmas pudding was different, however. Over the years, Charlotte had come to see its making as an expression of her love for her father, and the eating of it as a symbol of family, even if that family numbered only two. She had felt her bereavement deeply in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and was glad that the asylum authorities had opted for a cake instead. Plum pudding would have caught in her throat, Charlotte was sure; it would have seemed like a betrayal of her father.

The season, in general, had rekindled the guttering candle of her grief. The new year stretched out before her as an unpredictable future with no quiet protector to shape it; she understood, now, the liberty that had come from having someone she could trust to be there for her whenever she might need him. Her father had provided for her financially, but there was more than riches to feeling safe, and it was George Ross’s calm presence that had truly given Charlotte the security to make her way through life. She had not appreciated this fully when he was alive: its very nature was that it had seemed eternal, unequivocal.

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