by Anna Martin
“Be my guest.”
“I’m going to go through this in the broadest possible terms,” Shenal said, handing him a copy of her paperwork. “If you have any questions, please interrupt me.
“This is a copy of the contract regarding the property, Stretton House. My client, Annabell Richardson, wishes to hand ownership of Stretton House, its grounds, woodland, farmland, and any buildings contained thereon, to you, Henry Richardson, with the following clauses.” She paused for breath. “Although you will remain the sole owner of the property, both Mrs. Richardson and I, Shenal Gupta, will act as trustees. This means that any modifications to the house, its grounds, et cetera, must be approved by us prior to those modifications taking place. We retain our right to take legal action if this is not adhered to.
“Furthermore, in the event of Mrs. Richardson’s death, I will remain trustee to act in the interests of the property, basically to stop you from selling it or turning it into flats.”
“I don’t want to turn it into flats,” Henry said, his mind reeling a little.
“There are other bits and bobs in there,” Shenal said. “I won’t go through it all now; it would take forever. You might want to get your own lawyer to check it through before you sign anything.”
“Yeah… uh….” Henry forced his thoughts into order. “Do you have an electronic copy? I could e-mail it to him,” he asked, thinking of Gareth Swan.
Shenal nodded. “I can do that for you.”
“This is all a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo bullshit,” Nell said very matter-of-factly, “which is covering up the main point. I want my house to stay in my family. I don’t want to see it destroyed.”
After covering up his snort of surprise at her language, Henry nodded. “I can look after it for you. I’ll do that.”
Nell beamed. “Then it’s all set. I’ll leave it with Shenal to finalise the details.”
After his first meeting with his great-grandmother, it took Henry several days to figure out what the hell he was going to do. Shenal had duly e-mailed him a copy of the contract regarding the house, and he’d forwarded it on to Gareth. He’d received an automated reply but was yet to get a formal response from the man himself.
As long as there were no catches, and he’d not been able to find any on his own read-through, he couldn’t see any reason not to accept. Practicality told him that. Emotionally, he was feeling sore and battered, torn between his loyalty to New York and wonderment for the English countryside. It was what he’d been hoping for—more than what he’d dreamed of. A chance to relax and be somewhere where no one wanted anything from him and there were no expectations or misconceptions of who he was.
It was early spring, not yet warm enough to be outside without a jacket but pleasant enough to be walking outside. It was the perfect opportunity for Henry to wander around the village, figure out his surroundings and where everything was.
He learned that Cheddar sprawled. To his brain, which was trained to the grid structure of Manhattan, it wasn’t just confusing—it felt wrong. Learning his way around wasn’t particularly easy, but he picked up on a few local landmarks to help with navigation.
As he wandered, he thought.
It appeared, to him at least, that Stretton House was full of potential. That, and unless some serious renovation work was done it would soon fall into a state of disrepair. Already there were signs that work needed to be done, and things would only get worse over time.
The sort of capital needed to renovate the house was not sitting in Henry’s bank account. He had some inheritance money, but it wasn’t enough to do the sort of work that was required. Not nearly enough. Nor did he think Nell had that sort of disposable cash. If she had, there wouldn’t be the fuss with him taking over ownership of the property in the first place.
That meant the money had to be raised or earned, either by Henry himself or by making the house work for its own renovation money. And the best way—scratch that—the only way Henry could think of was to open the house up for private hire.
He knew Nell had been against turning the house into a hotel, but that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind.
Of course, Henry reasoned as he walked, he could always go back to New York, that opportunity hadn’t yet passed. He had no ties to the little village. If he were to take on the house it would mean months of commitment, months when he was unlikely to be able to return home.
At times it all felt like a dream, one that was bordering on nightmarish responsibility. Shenal had kept Gareth pretty far out of the loop with regards to what was actually going on with Nell and Cheddar and Stretton House. It wasn’t as simple as he’d thought. Or hoped.
But there was something here that made him want to stay. He didn’t quite understand why, not yet, but at times it felt like Cheddar was brimming with opportunities that simply didn’t exist in New York. There wasn’t anything pressing waiting for him back home—not a job, or a boyfriend.
He continued to walk, and research, and think.
His mind had always had a habit of taking an idea and running with it, and while he walked his head was full of all the ways Stretton House had the potential to be great, or even more than great: fantastic. It was going to take a huge amount of work, because he didn’t want to turn it into something new. He wanted to restore what was already there and take it back to what it was at the height of the Richardsons’ ownership.
Opening the house to the rest of the world was the only way he could possibly see it being saved.
From the point of making that decision, Henry called Shenal. It wasn’t maybe the best idea, considering how she was acting in the interests of someone other than him. But he didn’t know anyone else.
“Yo,” Shenal said as she slid into a chair opposite him at a café in the middle of Cheddar village. “What can I do you for?”
“Do you want a coffee?”
“Green tea,” she said, smirking a little as Henry winced and rose to place her order. He already had a cafetière of coffee and a massive scone filled with jam and cream waiting for him, and, after a moment’s consideration, he ordered Shenal a scone too.
“I’ll bring it over,” the blue-haired lady behind the counter told him, and he nodded.
“Did you get me one of these?” Shenal demanded, pointing to his scone, and Henry pulled it back toward himself as he sat, slightly protective of his cake.
“Yes.”
“Thanks, love. But seriously, what do you want. I’m a busy woman, you know.”
Today she was dressed in a rich emerald green sari which had a loose, billowing blouse, and her jewellery once again matched her outfit. Hair pinned back in a large practical bun and fingernails painted a soft gold, she was a picture of effectiveness and style.
“Henry,” she said, snapping her fingers at him. “Come on.”
“I want to renovate the house,” he said in a rush, then took a large gulp of his still-too-hot coffee.
Shenal was silent for a long moment, then sighed. “Well, you can’t,” she said simply, and accepted her green tea and scone from the blue-haired lady with a muttered “Thanks.”
“Okay, so, renovate was the wrong word,” Henry said. “I want to restore it.”
Regarding him suspiciously over the top of her mug, Shenal continued to give off an air of definite distrustfulness.
“With what?” she demanded. “That house needs a lot of work doing to it, Henry. It’s not a lick of paint and Bob’s your uncle.”
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, and pulled his precious iPad from his bag. “There’s this thing in the UK called the National Trust—”
“I have heard of it,” Shenal said drily, then licked a blob of cream from her thumb and made a “go on” expression with her hand.
“And they let people into these beautiful old houses and charge people to get in. And that’s how they make their money.”
“That’s all well and good,” Shenal said, “but you can’t sell tickets to go around the house
as it is now. You’ll need to do the restoration work first.”
“I know. That’s where I need your help.”
Shenal rolled her eyes and continued to eat her scone in silence as Henry flicked through photos and websites and tried to show her he was trying to do this right. To do it the way it was supposed to be done.
It had taken days of research to compile the information he’d needed, then to sift through it all to decide what was relevant and what wasn’t. Henry had always been pretty good at research. It was one of the few things at school he’d actually enjoyed, and his more unusual requests while party planning required plenty of investigation to pull off. While making all his plans for the house, turning ideas into solid strategies, a nagging voice in the back of his head said that these things would take months, if not years to fully implement. He couldn’t abandon this project halfway through. It needed a good project manager to see it through to fruition, or the house would literally fall to pieces within a decade or so.
It was a big commitment, and Henry wasn’t great at big commitments. He was still living in the hotel, for fuck’s sake. He couldn’t even commit to somewhere to live.
But Shenal didn’t know about his past, and she wasn’t judging him on his previous failures. All she had in front of her was one big stack of information and a guy who wanted to do something good. She was the gatekeeper; Henry knew that. To impress Nell, he first needed to get through her slightly ferocious lawyer.
When he ran out of words, Henry sat back, sipped at his rapidly cooling coffee, and waited. Eventually, Shenal stopped flicking through his folder, titled “Stretton House,” and sat back too, cradling her mug of vile tea to her chest.
“I don’t know where you’ll get the money from,” she said, her tone holding some kind of warning.
“Okay.”
“But Nell might.”
Chapter Three
He was still a little terrified of the lady, who exhibited so much style and class and possessed that acid tongue, but this time he had the knowledge that he was trying to help to settle his nerves.
To her credit, Nell sat and listened as he pitched his ideas for her family home, showing her the same pictures that Shenal had mulled over and waiting for any flicker of emotion to cross her face.
He was still waiting as he finished, slightly breathless, and sat back. His iPad still sat on Nell’s lap, and she thoughtfully flicked through the photo album, like he’d shown her.
“This is Stourhead,” she commented, stopping on a picture of grand gardens surrounding another manor house.
“Yes, I think so,” Henry said.
“Nell,” Shenal said gently, and the old woman looked up. Catching Shenal’s eye, she huffed in annoyance and turned her eyes back to the screen in front of her.
“Henry, why did your business fail?” Nell asked.
He inhaled sharply. It was still a sore subject.
“I suppose,” he started, then forced himself to vocalise the facts he knew were true. “It started out so easy, you know? I never sat down and wrote a business plan of how I was going to market, sustain, grow the business, grow my network. I fell into it because I was good at it. Not that that’s a bad thing, really. It failed because I didn’t plan. I didn’t look far enough into the future, and I completely ignored all the warnings about the economic crisis.”
“And so what did you learn?”
Henry smiled to himself and tried to banish thoughts of Yoda and young Padawan from his mind.
“I learned that keeping a firm grasp on reality is essential. There is no such thing as frivolity in business. Even the businesses which seem the most free-spirited need to have things like accounts and ledgers if they’re going to succeed.”
Nell appeared pleased with his response. “You’re a good man, Henry,” she said, patting his hand lightly with her own gnarled fingers. “I think you’ll do just fine.”
“Does that mean….”
“You have my blessing to go ahead,” she said simply. “However, may I offer a few suggestions?”
“Of course.”
“I would think the best way to get immediate access to some cash would be to sell off a few acres. We can afford to do that, and on the far side of the grounds, just past the river, there is a riding school on the site of the old stables. It’s far enough away from the main house that no one in their right mind would ever go out that far anyway, so we needn’t worry about them encroaching. The man who runs the school has approached me several times in the past to purchase that land. I said no, mostly because I could. I’d start there.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “That sounds fine.”
“Shenal will get you his number. Also, Roger Castle’s son is in construction, I believe. I trust Roger implicitly. If you want good work done, and local, you go to him.” She turned to Shenal. “You’ll get his number too.”
“Of course,” Shenal said. Nell nodded, apparently satisfied.
“That’ll do for a start.”
“Don’t you mind the way she talks to you?” Henry asked once they were back out in the car.
“Not really,” Shenal said, signalling to turn out of the care home’s car park. “She’s from another generation, you know? Nell’s respectful, but when she was our age, people with dark skin were looked down on by society. And she thinks I’m too young to be doing this.”
“She told you that?”
“Oh yeah.” Shenal laughed. “I’m only twenty-three. I came straight out of university and trained hard for a year with my father, then took over most of the firm’s business last year. Nell has changed her attitudes massively over the years, she’s surprisingly modern minded for someone of her age, but some habits die hard.”
Henry nodded. “Does that excuse her behaviour, though?”
“Being an Indian woman in this country, especially a working professional woman, means that you deal with a lot more prejudice on a daily basis than a bossy little old lady. You learn to pick your battles.”
“That’s so funny. I feel the same way about being gay.”
“And picking your battles?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a minority thing. You learn to live with it.”
When she dropped him back off in the village, Henry decided that Shenal was possibly becoming one of his first friends here. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, but she seemed to respect him, and he felt the same way about her. In his mental calendar, he pencilled in taking her out for lunch.
The manor was just far enough away from the hotel that he didn’t like to make the trip too frequently. It took about forty-five minutes to walk there. That was if the weather was good and he wasn’t weighed down with layers and jackets. After he’d taken the five-minute walk up the drive to get to the front door, it made it nearly a two-hour round trip, taking up the best part of his day.
But he was a New Yorker and used to walking, the scenery was beautiful and the weather was staying mostly dry, so he didn’t mind too much. Plus, he’d taken the spare set of keys from Shenal, so he could come and go as he pleased.
In the space of a few days, Henry explored and documented most of the ground floor of the house, deciding what needed to be done and a vague priority order. The kitchens needed total refurbishment, something that both pleased and distressed him. Unfortunately, the counters and cupboards were rotting away due to lack of use and mice. There was no other option than to rip it all out and start again.
He was determined to keep the little nook pantry and the wide island in the middle of the room when it was renovated, turning the space into something like how he imagined the kitchens at Hogwarts to look (although on a much smaller scale).
At the front of the house, the two sitting rooms and the library mostly needed an extraordinarily good cleaning, and he would assess the level of work needed from there. He was hoping that once the tatty carpet had been stripped back, the floorboards underneath would be in good enough condition to be polished u
p. Then he could spend some money on good rugs, and it would look much better.
He also planned to get a professional librarian in to go through the books in the library. They looked very old, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to start pulling them from the shelves until he knew he wasn’t going to cause any damage. If they were too delicate to be kept on show for the public, there was a local museum he had thought about donating them to.
Upstairs, the seven bedrooms needed to be renovated pretty much from scratch. The wallpaper and paint were peeling, the little furniture that was left was in a terrible state of disrepair, and, again, the carpets were disgusting. Henry was grateful that the building did, at least, have plumbing to the upstairs bathrooms. He didn’t want to even consider the cost of having that put in.
Apparently, en-suite master bathrooms were not in fashion when the manor was initially built, but ladies’ powder rooms were. There was one powder room that could possibly be turned into a master bath, and two other bathrooms, all of which would need to be ripped out and refitted.
The more he considered, the more work it became clear needed to be done, more to get permission from Nell to do. He made sketches of his ideas, which only proved how inadequate an artist he was. None of his ideas seemed to transfer themselves to paper very well.
A fear of displeasing his great-grandmother, or worse, inadvertently going against her wishes when it came to his renovations, caused Henry to be particularly careful with his ideas and designs. Most of it came down to restoration where possible, renovation where not, and building from scratch where there was no other option.
When pressed for answers to what, at times, felt like a never-ending stream of questions sent by e-mail, Shenal would inevitably come back with the advice to stick as close to the nature of the house as was possible. This wasn’t the best advice in the world. His research so far had shown how many changes the house had been through since it was originally built.
