The Reluctant Elf (Kindle Single) Read Online Free Page A

planning on it, that’s for sure. Do you still worry about something happening to me?’
    When she nods, my heart breaks a little. How am I supposed to make her feel secure? I don’t have the authority to tell the Grim Reaper to bugger off and bother someone else.
    I hug her little body to mine. ‘Well I’m not going anywhere and neither are you. We’ve got too much living to do!’
    She returns my smile.
    ‘Let’s go see what the rest of the house looks like, okay?’
    ‘Yes, that’s quite enough of this morbid talk for one day,’ says my world-weary seven-year-old.
    Danny bounds down the stairs just as we come out of the dining room. ‘What’s the prognosis down here?’ he asks.
    ‘It looks like the ceiling is coming down in the dining room and there are mouse droppings in the kitchen sink. How’s it looking upstairs?’
    He shakes his head. ‘Mushrooms are literally growing on the floorboards in the bedrooms, and mould up most of the walls.’
    ‘Maybe you could cook them.’
    ‘Not unless you want to risk poisoning. I think your Aunt was optimistic when she got all that paint. This place needs more than a coat on the walls. It needs a structural engineer.’
    Nobody has ever accused Aunt Kate of pessimism.
    ‘Well we’ve only got three days to do what we can and hope the place doesn’t fall down before the guests leave. At least the furniture is all right. There’s just too much of it. But yes, Aunt Kate is definitely an optimist.’
    While Dad went to university, studied hard and gained respectability in professorial circles, his little sister was traveling by campervan across Europe trying to make a go of her musical career. Whenever their parents told her she was nuts, she just laughed and hugged them. There wasn’t much that Aunt Kate couldn’t overcome with a giggle, a hug, a wing and a prayer.
    She did achieve some success as an opera singer, and performed small parts in most of Europe’s capitals.
    She was never great with money though, and often accepted payment for her roles in clothes instead of cash. After ten years she came back to England with trunks full of gowns and little else. But she didn’t mind that. ‘My life is rich,’ she said. ‘My bank account doesn’t need to be.’
     

Chapter Four
     
    ‘ What are you doing?’ Danny asks the next morning, possibly wondering why I’m standing on the dining room table in my pyjamas holding my phone towards the crumbling ceiling.
    ‘Oh,’ I say, pulling my robe around me. ‘You’re early.’
    It was nearly midnight by the time he left last night. We’d worked straight through but when I got up this morning it didn’t look like we’d made much difference.
    We did find all the sheets and towels at least, and Aunt Kate’s hoarding tendency means there’s plenty of formal china and glassware for the guests. Today the heavy work really begins.
    ‘I’m trying to get a signal. I’ll try outside in a minute but I wanted to see what the reception was like in the house. So far it’s a 3G black hole in here.’
    The reviewer may not appreciate having to stand on the dining table to send a text.
    ‘These old walls might look ready to cave in but they’re probably quite thick,’ he says. ‘You could try the conservatory.’
    Sure enough, my phone whistles with new emails when I reach the ornate glasshouse.
    The noise excites one of the pigeons making camp on the floor. He takes flight through a broken window while the rest of his cooing friends watch me have a minor heart attack.
    ‘Hey Danny?’ I call back inside. ‘How are your pigeon-whispering skills? We have feathered houseguests. If you can convince them to go outside we can try to clean all the poo off the floor.’
    It’s frigid out here but with the wood-burning stove going in the middle of the room and the addition of some sofas and chairs, it might pass for shabby chic instead of just shabby. At least there’s a phone signal.
    I scroll through my emails,