The Christmas Mouse Read Free

across the grass.
    In Caxley it would not be so rough, she hoped. Most of the time her family would be under cover in the shops, but out here, at Shepherds Cross, they always caught the full violence of the weather.
    Mrs Berry’s cottage was the third one spaced along the road that led to Springbourne. All three cottages were roomy, with large gardens containing gnarled old apple and plum trees. Each cottage possessed ancient hawthorn hedges, supplying sanctuary to dozens of little birds.
    An old drovers’ path ran at right angles to the cottages, crossing the road by Mrs Berry’s house. This gave the hamlet its name, although it was many years since sheep had been driven along that green lane to the great sheep fair at the downland village ten miles distant.
    Some thought it a lonely spot, and declared that they ‘would go melancholy mad, that they would!’ But Mrs Berry, used to remote houses since childhood, was not affected.
    She had been brought up in a gamekeeper’s cottage in a woodland ride. As a small child she rarely saw anyone strange, except on Sundays, when she attended church with her parents.
    She had loved that church, relishing its loftiness, its glowing stained-glass windows and the flowers on the altar. She paid attention to the exhortations of the vicar too, a holy man who truly ministered to his neighbours. From him, as much as from the example of her parents, she learned early to appreciate modesty, courage, and generosity.
    When she was old enough to read she deciphered a plaque upon the chancel floor extolling the virtues of a local benefactor, a man of modest means who nevertheless ‘
was hospitable and charitable for all his Days
’ and who, at his end, left ‘
the interest of Forty Pounds to the Poor of the parish forever
.’
    It was the next line or two which the girl never forgot, and which influenced her own life. They read:
    Such were the good effects of
    Virtue and Oeconomy
    Read, Grandeur, and Blush
    Certainly, goodness and thrift, combined with a horror of ostentation and boasting, were qualities which Mrs Berry embodied all the days of her life, and her daughters profited by her example.
    Mrs Berry left the kitchen and went to sit by the fire in the living room. It was already growing dark, for the sky was thick with storm clouds, and the rain showed no sign of abating.
    Water bubbled in the crack of the window frame, and Mrs Berry sighed. It was at times like this one needed a man about the place. Unobtrusively, without complaint, Stanley and then Bertie had attended to such things asdraughty windows, wobbly door knobs, squeaking floor-boards and the like. Now the women had to cope as best they could, and an old house, about two hundred years of age, certainly needed constant attention to keep it in trim.

    Nevertheless, it looked pretty and gay. The Christmas tree, dressed the night before by Jane and Frances – with many squeals of delight – stood on the side table, spangled with stars and tinsel, and bearing the Victorian fairy doll, three inches high, which had once adorned the Christmas trees of Mrs Berry’s own childhood. The doll’s tiny wax face was brown with age but still bore that sweet expression which the child had imagined was an angel’s.
    Sprigs of holly were tucked behind the picture frames, and a spray of mistletoe hung where the oil lamp had once swung from the central beam over the dining table.
    Mrs Berry leaned back in her chair and surveyed it all with satisfaction. It looked splendid and there was very little more to be done to the preparations in the kitchen. The turkey was stuffed, the potatoes peeled. The Christmas pudding had been made in November and stood ready on the shelf to be plunged into the steamer tomorrow morning. Mince pies waited in the tin, and a splendid Christmas cake, iced and decorated with robins and holly by Mrs Berry herself, would grace the tea table tomorrow.
    There would also be a small Madeira cake, with a delicious sliver