Anna Partridge in a Pear Tree

By Stephanie Dagg

Anna Partridge is house-sitting for family friends in a very cold cottage in the middle of snowy France. She’ll be there for a fortnight over Christmas. It’s all rather quiet and unexciting until, on Boxing Day, a pheasant gets tangled in the pear tree in the garden. Anna can’t possibly leave it there but her rescue attempt goes horribly wrong, leaving her the stuck one. All she can do is wait to be rescued by a knight in shining armour, or at least a passing Frenchman in posh wellies...
This is a short, festive, feel-good story to brighten your Christmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Dagg
• Release date: Dec 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370206629

Stephanie Dagg

I'm an English ex-pat living in France with my family and a lot of animals, including llamas and carp. I was a bestselling author in Ireland, where we lived for 15 years before we moved to our new home here. I've recently relaunched my writing career, but this time as an indie ebook author and publisher. It's the twenty-first century after all!

Book preview

Preface

I’m going with the usual tradition of the Twelve Days of Christmas starting on Boxing Day, 26th December. Some argue that the period starts on Christmas Day itself, but I prefer to follow the medieval approach. As Christmas Day was a holy day, there’d be no partying that day so the fun part of Christmas started with Boxing Day.

So please bear with me, even if you disagree, and enjoy this festive, feel-good story.

Dedication

To Mum

Anna Partridge in a Pear Tree

Anna groaned. What had she been thinking when she’d volunteered to house-sit for her Aunt Rose? Not that it was Aunt Rose’s house she was looking after. No, Anna was doing the favour her aunt was meant to be doing. Rose had volunteered to spend a fortnight in a friend’s cottage in France, starting a few days before Christmas. Her neighbours, Pat and Ron, had bought the place eighteen months ago as a holiday home for the summertime, but last winter all the pipes had frozen and it had cost them a fortune to get everything repaired. They’d been going to come down themselves this year, to check that the new central heating system was working properly, but then Pat fell and broke her hip. Nasty. Aunt Rose leapt into the breach – for all of two days before she got an invite from an old flame, recently divorced, to join him Down Under on his cattle ranch over the festive season. Just to see how things might develop… She was desperate to go but couldn’t let her friends down. Then she thought of Anna.

And who was Anna to deprive Aunt Rose to get her chance at happiness? Or, if she was anything like her niece, her chance to have her heart broken and trampled on by some miserable, self-centred, duplicitous bastard who oozed charm and swore love and loyalty but in reality chased after anything in a skirt, but preferably tight jeans, and was a cheat and a liar and a low-life. Perhaps, Anna reflected, she was letting recent experiences jaundice her view a little. She hoped things would work out for her aunt.

Christmas in France had sounded so exotic, so enticing, that being in-between jobs and getting herself back together after a stressful break-up Anna had jumped at the offer. She merrily mentally glossed over the part about Central France being a little chilly, which was pretty dumb of her since that was the reason she was going to be there at all - to make sure things didn’t freeze solid. So when she arrived to a foot of snow and temperatures well below freezing, it came as something of a shock. She hadn’t expected it to be that cold.

Or that dead. Everyone had hunkered down to eat and drink themselves into a stupor over the festive season in the warmth and comfort of their own homes. Anna had hardly seen a soul since she’d arrived three days ago. To be fair, tatty notices stuck up outside the local Mairie informed her that she’d missed a Marché de Noël and Soirée Choucroute the previous weekend — the former would have been nice, but she most definitely couldn’t see the appeal of the latter, a cabbage-based supper — but nothing whatsoever appeared to be happening for the foreseeable future. Anna had been to the village shop for supplies a couple of times, but been the only customer on each occasion. During her many short and extremely brisk walks – she was a bit of a fitness fanatic - she hadn’t