‘Thirty-nine, are you?’ Fears went on. ‘Birthday anytime soon?’

‘Are you going to bring me a present?’

The old man’s face broke into a smirk. ‘Dunno if I’ll need to. No one in the big house ever lived beyond forty.’ He raised his tankard. ‘Good health, you and your pretty wife. Long life – eh?’

26

Sunday 16 December

Jason and Emily walked in silence through the village, past the store, the smithy, and houses and cottages almost all looking Christmassy. The sky was darkening and it was feeling even colder than earlier. They held gloved hands.

‘That was such bullshit, that horrible old farmer,’ Jason said. ‘About no one living beyond forty. The Penze-Weedells are both well north of the big Four Zero, so screw you, Mr Interbred Local Miserableguts.’

‘Three couples from our estate killed in accidents?’ Emily said. ‘All in the past few months? What’s that about?’

‘Em, I don’t know. Just a freak of statistics?’

‘Or a jinx or a curse? Are all of us cursed? What have we moved into?’

‘Our beautiful dream home, where we are going to be very happy.’

‘Dream on.’

‘Hey!’ He put his arm around her and hugged her tightly, trying to put out of his mind the people he had seen in the house opposite and the woman who had come into his studio, trying – and almost succeeding – to dismiss them as figments of his overworked, tired brain. ‘We are not jinxed, there is no hex, or whatever, OK?’

They walked on in silence.

‘Hexes are…’ he began before falling silent again, trying to frame what he wanted to say.

‘What did he mean?’ Emily said. ‘About no one in the old house ever living beyond forty?’

‘He was talking about the past,’ Jason replied. ‘Life expectancy in the nineteenth century was about forty for a male and I think about forty-two for women. But that took into account infant mortality, death in childbirth, wars. It’s very different now. The Penze-Weedells – I rest my case.’

‘He gave me the creeps.’

‘Just a miserable old git who doesn’t like change. Reminds me of that Oscar Wilde line in one of his plays. Poor daddy’s like a pot plant abandoned in a dark corner, wondering where the sunshine has gone.’

She squeezed his hand, smiling. ‘I like that.’

‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had snow,’ he said, changing the subject as they approached the pillars with the wyverns on top.

‘Amazing,’ she echoed but without any enthusiasm. Then she said, ‘I just cannot believe the cheek of those people. I was so looking forward to a nice quiet lunch with you, on our own. “Eyyyy don’t suppose yew’d find it an imposition if we joined yewwwww?”’

‘They’re both well past forty – I’d put him mid-fifties.’

‘She’s no spring chicken, for sure.’

‘We need to set some boundaries with them, PDQ.’

‘Barbed wire down the middle of the road?’

‘Trenches.’

‘A moat with a drawbridge? I went to a medium once, in my teens. He said he could see me living in a house with a moat and a drawbridge.’