‘Samplers?’ I asked, interested.
‘Oh, yes – I’d forgotten you collect them. The Revell ladies all seem to have been industrious needlewomen.’
‘I’ll look forward to seeing those,’ I said, then shivered. ‘There’s a strange atmosphere in here, don’t you think?’
‘There’s certainly a cold atmosphere. The central heating doesn’t extend this far, so there are just a few ancient electric storage heaters dotted about to keep the damp away. This wing wasn’t used once the new building was completed, apart from the muniment room, which was my uncle’s library and office until he became bed bound.’
‘New storage heaters would be more cost effective, but maybe when you’ve had the old electric sockets replaced,’ I suggested. ‘Those sound dangerous.’
‘There are adaptors, so you can use three-pin plugs, but it’s a bit of a deathtrap at the moment,’ Carey agreed. ‘A lot of the furniture was removed soon after Ella came here fifteen years ago, when my uncle decided to allow the occasional coach party to visit. I don’t think there’s anything later than the eighteenth century in here now.’
‘I wonder what he did with it. After all, practically everything in the new part was designed and made for it, so none of it’s there.’
‘I wondered that, and I’m sort of hoping it’s in one of the attics,’ he said, his eyes gleaming. ‘Though not in this part of the house, because there isn’t much of a roof space.’
‘How have you managed to stop yourself from searching the other attics?’
‘Because I feel just like I did when there was a present under the Christmas tree and I was afraid to open it in case it wasn’t what I really wanted.’
‘But there might be nothing there at all, if your uncle got rid of anything he thought redundant. Or else he kept it, but it’s all monstrously huge and heavy Victorian mahogany.’
‘What a happy thought,’ he said, closing the door behind us and then leading the way into a wooden-floored gallery that ran along the back of the house. There were wall brackets that might once have held burning torches, but now were fitted with funny little curly light fittings, like whipped ice-cream cones.
A warren of small rooms led off it, including one set out as a nursery that I remembered seeing on my last visit, with an ancient cradle standing near the hearth.
The windows were all diamond paned in thick, greenish, uneven glass that distorted the view and there were unexpected steps up and down, and twists and turns, in the bewilderingly random way of many such old properties.
Finally, we arrived at the top of the main staircase, which was unusual in that the flight up from the hall divided into two at a half-landing, where the real attraction for me lay: the five leaded windows.
They were quite narrow, with pointed tops, and started at about the level of my chin. ‘I’ll need a stepladder …’ I muttered, standing on tiptoe to see what I could: it looked as if they had been made in three panels, the top triangular one being the smallest. There was a plastic margarine tub on the ledge under the central window, containing a few broken fragments of glass. I squinted up again, trying to make out where the damage was.
‘You shall have a ladder and yours truly to hold it steady … later,’ Carey promised. ‘As part of that great big survey of the whole place we’re going to make, remember?’
‘Oh, yes – that “break” you said I needed,’ I said snarkily, going down the bottom flight of stairs for the long-distance view of the windows.
‘Nice pair of heraldic crests in the two windows on the left,’ I said. ‘Probably contemporary with the building of this wing. The two on the right are a little later and I’d say a new panel with an escutcheon was put in at the top to replace a clear section, sometime in the seventeenth century. Those look like strawberry leaves, so that should mean someone of rather nobler blood marrying into the family,’ I added.
‘I think Lady Anne was of noble birth – she wouldn’t be addressed as Lady Anne, otherwise – but an impoverished widow, which is probably why she was happy to marry into the minor gentry.’
‘The Lady Anne window has the date it was made at the bottom,’ I observed. This was lucky, for it was nothing like any other seventeenth-century windows I’d ever seen, having a design of painted motifs in circles at the centre of each diamond pane. It was that that had made me think of a sampler, the first time I saw it. Now I was further away I noticed something had been taped over the damaged section at the top. ‘What did you say happened to it?’
‘An unfortunate bird flew into it – or at least, the remains were found below, so it was presumed so. Clem stopped up the gap to keep out the elements and the pieces were collected up and put in that box.’
‘The window was probably weakened already. I suspect the tie bars on all of them need some attention,’ I said absently. Each panel would originally have been tied with wires to a metal bar set horizontally across into the masonry, to keep it from sagging or bulging over the centuries, but they did tend eventually to break loose.
‘The Lady Anne window will definitely have to come out,’ I told him. ‘And as I’ve said before, you really should send it away to be professionally restored or conserved, because it’s a rare example of a seventeenth-century window. It’s really different from most glass of its time.’
‘No way is it ever leaving Mossby, or some dreadful doom will fall on the House of Revell,’ he said flippantly, but with an underlying seriousness.
‘Then you’d better hope the ghost counts the workshop as part of Mossby. Otherwise, no dice.’
‘I’m hoping I can loosely interpret Mossby to mean the whole estate, but if Lady Anne should pop out of the wainscoting while you’re removing it, perhaps you could assure her you’ll have it back in pristine condition in no time.’
I gave him a look.
‘Will you have to cut and paint new pieces of glass to repair it?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely not!’ I exclaimed, horrified. ‘I hope to reuse the broken pieces, leaded together with narrow ribbon calme. A specialist would have a lot more techniques to offer, like edge-bonding the pieces back together with clear resin, but I’m just going to conserve what’s there, not try and restore or renovate it.’
‘Sounds tricky, anyway,’ he said.
‘It will be … and I may have to take the whole window apart and re-lead it, while I’m at it.’ I mused over it for a moment and then added, ‘I might ask advice from a friend of Julian’s who works in glass conservation at York, before I start.’
And suddenly I really wanted Julian to be there to talk it over with. He’d have been as interested as I was in the design.
‘Come on, there’ll be plenty of time to moon over the windows later,’ Carey said briskly. ‘Let’s finish the whistle-stop tour.’
I think he was tiring, for his limp was more evident as we crossed the flagged Great Hall. The walls were decorated with ancient arms and vacant suits of armour … or at least, I hoped they were vacant.
‘There’s a kitchen of sorts at the other end and a few more rooms, but the rest of the service wing was demolished once the new house was finished,’ he explained.
‘Back in the days when your home was your unlisted castle and you could knock it about to suit yourself?’
‘Yes, you’d certainly never get away with it now, not even the lift in the tower. But I’ll restore it really sympathetically, in my usual wonderful way,’ he said modestly.
We passed through a dim parlour and along a passage to a door he had to unlock.
‘The muniment room,’ he said grandly, bowing me in. ‘This way, my lady!’
‘I have no idea what a muniment is,’ I confessed.
‘No, me neither. But somewhere in here is the secret hidey-hole that Mr Wilmslow will reveal tomorrow. There’s a priest-hole in the Great Hall somewhere, too, just big enough to hold a man, but that one is common knowledge.’
‘I vaguely remember we were shown that. It’s about the size of a gl
orified linen cupboard.’
‘They discovered another upstairs when they were knocking down the service wing. Behind a cupboard there was an entrance to a stair leading up to a room in the eaves. There are probably others too, because the family were originally Catholic at a time when that wasn’t a great idea.’
‘Didn’t you say the hiding place in here is full of family papers?’
‘Apparently they’ve just been stuffing them into an old chest for centuries.’
‘Sounds fascinating. Nick’s certainly going to want that in the series! The Mossby Secrets could be a whole chapter in your first book about the house, too.’
‘Books. The more I see, the more I realize that restoring and looking after Mossby will be my life-work.’
‘But will you be happy staying in one place for very long?’ I asked.
‘I would here, because this is my place,’ he explained. ‘I expect I’ll take commissions to work on other properties later, but I’ll always want to come back home.’
The muniment room was a long chamber which, despite the dark panelling and large fireplace, was not entirely in period with the rest of the house. There were several fairly recent additions, like a lamp, a roll-top desk, a large Turkish rug and a wall of bookcases, some glazed.
‘My uncle liked to hang out here before his last illness. He was allegedly writing a family history, but he was working back and had only got as far as the wealthy but plebeian mill owner who married the last Revell in the middle of the nineteenth century and changed his surname to hers.’
‘That would be … the father of the Ralph Revell who married Jessie Kaye?’ I ventured.
‘I think so – I’ll have to go into it later. There must be a family tree in here somewhere.’
I looked round. ‘Don’t you have any idea where the secret hiding place is, then?’
‘No, not even a hint. I’ll have to contain myself till tomorrow. Usually the secret is passed directly down from one heir to the other, but in this case, Mr Wilmslow is the middleman.’
But now I’d spotted the samplers on the darkest wall, some framed and some simply on stretchers, and Carey had to drag me away.
‘Like the windows, those will have to wait for another day,’ he said firmly. ‘It feels like hours since lunch and I’m ravenous!’
I was sure he was also tired, so I didn’t protest, and we returned via the turret to the twenty-first century.
‘I don’t know about you,’ I said, ‘but I’m bushed and I want to unpack a few things and then just chill for a while.’
‘OK, but why don’t we go along the road to that pub – hotel – whatever it is, and have dinner, in a bit? I noticed a sign saying they served food.’
‘The Screaming Skull? Yes, we could do that. I’ll drive so you can get legless.’
Then I realized what I’d said and looked at him, appalled at my slip of the tongue.
Carey grinned wryly. ‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you.’
During luncheon we discussed what might be the subject of the windows in the inner hall and Miss Revell suggested roses. They appear to be her great passion and, though at this time of year there was nothing to show me in her rose garden on the first terrace, she described each variety that grew there in great detail.
Father, who is not much interested in horticulture, went off with Mr Revell to view the gas-producing plant, which was in a building near the stables, and I confess I had an unladylike interest in seeing it for myself.
However, Miss Revell has inspired me with ideas based around her beloved roses and I will have some designs ready to show her brother on his next visit to London.
For the rest of our stay, Mr Revell barely left my side and even accompanied us to the station when we departed after lunch the following day.
Of course, I completely understood his passion for Mossby and his striving to have everything perfect, down to the very smallest detail, so we had much to talk about. This does make one lose track of the time …
I don’t think Honoria shared his interests, but behind her severe façade she clearly doted on her handsome younger brother – even more than on her beloved roses!
While Mr Revell had shown me great attention during our visit, it had merely been on the friendly basis we had established in London. If sometimes my breath caught and my heart beat a little faster when he turned those wonderful eyes on me, glowing with enthusiasm, that was hardly to be surprised at.
But I could see Father was uneasy as we travelled home and after some harrumphing warned me not to put the wrong interpretation on to Mr Revell’s attentions to me during our stay.
‘Oh, no, Father,’ I assured him briskly. ‘I am sure that with his friend Mr Browne away, he was simply missing a sympathetic ear to discuss his grand schemes with. In fact, Miss Revell more or less told me so, soon after we arrived.’
I did not add that since he was tall, handsome and a member of the gentry, while I was an insignificant dab of a tradesman’s daughter, it would have been silly indeed for me to cherish hopes in that direction!
‘I thought that you and Michael would make a match of it,’ Father said.
‘I love my cousin like a brother and am delighted that he and Lily are to marry,’ I said. ‘They are perfect for each other – and as for me, I love my work and am entirely contented with my single state.’
Which I was, especially since I had begun to take a much greater role in the business. Few husbands, I fancied, would be likely to tolerate such involvement from their wives.
19
The Screaming Skull
‘How could you possibly forget that there was another Jessie Kaye window above the main staircase?’ I said, not for the first time, as I drove us to the Screaming Skull.
He shrugged. ‘I just did. Anyway, you’ve seen them all now.’
‘Are you quite sure there isn’t another one somewhere that’s slipped your mind?’ I said sarcastically and he laughed.
‘No, that’s the lot. I think I forgot that one because it doesn’t look like the panels in the hall.’
‘It’s a much later window – the rose theme again, but stronger and less stylized.’
He gave me a sideways look and a grin. ‘Come to think of it, there is a bit more stained glass in the nursery – the small top lights of the windows. But that’s totally different again and I’m sure it was made by someone else.’
‘I’ll see for myself tomorrow. I don’t think I trust your judgement or your memory!’
We’d arrived at the pub and I parked the car near a large information board. It welcomed us to the start of the Halfhidden ghost trail, which according to the map, began at the bottom of a nearby path and led up through the Sweetwell woods to the Lady Spring. A biting wind drove us indoors at this point, past a deserted beer garden that would be lovely in summer.
I was sure Carey would be able to walk there easily by then, and maybe even up to that spring and on to the other spectral delights of Halfhidden.
Once inside it was surprisingly warm, noisy and crowded, and we pushed our way to the bar to see if we could eat in the restaurant … and came face to face with a grinning, red-stained skull in an alcove between rows of bottles. It was wearing the sort of thin silver cardboard crown you find folded inside a cracker.
‘That’s Howling Hetty, that is,’ explained the plump young woman who came to serve us.
‘So, this must be the Screaming Skull the hotel is named after?’ Carey asked.
‘That’s right, and the rest of her roams the Sweetwell woods at night, trying to find her head.’
The barmaid was now looking at Carey as if she thought she ought to know him from somewhere … or if not, as if she’d like to.
‘We wondered if we could eat in the restaurant without a booking?’ I asked, and she reluctantly unpeeled her eyes from Carey and shouted round a partition into another bar. ‘Lulu! Can you fit two more people in for dinner?’
There was an indistinguishable reply an
d the barmaid said, ‘Lulu will come and sort you out in a minute.’
This sounded slightly ominous, but a nearby door opened and a pretty woman of about my own age, with curling dark brown hair, came out. She was wearing a most sumptuously patterned tunic in jewel colours and I immediately wanted to ask her where she got it from.
The barmaid indicated us with a flip of the hand before moving off to serve clamouring customers.
‘Hi, did you want a table in the restaurant?’ Lulu asked us.
Carey gave her his best smile. ‘We haven’t got a booking, but we wondered if you could fit us in for dinner?’
‘I could in about half an hour, if that suits?’ she said. ‘Would you like to follow me through to the lounge? It’s much quieter.’
It was indeed, for the only other occupant was a fair, slight, handsome man who was seated at a small table and totally absorbed in something on the laptop in front of him.
‘That’s better, we can hear ourselves think.’ She gave us a friendly smile. ‘I’m Lulu Tamblyn. My parents own the Screaming Skull and I help out when it’s busy. The rest of the time I run the Haunted Holidays and Haunted Weekends – you may have heard of them?’
‘I was telling Carey about the ghost trail only today,’ I said. ‘I’m Angelique Arrowsmith and this is—’
‘Oh, I know who you are, from the telly!’ she said to him. ‘And I know that you’ve just inherited Mossby.’
‘The local grapevine must have been working overtime,’ he said ruefully.
‘Nothing stays a secret round here for long. And after all, you are a celebrity, so it’s quite exciting.’
‘Minor celeb at most,’ he said modestly.
‘Cam!’ Lulu called imperatively to the blond man, and he tore his eyes away from the screen and looked up.
‘This is my husband, Cameron. He’s an artist and owns the Hidden Hoards gallery in the village.’
She introduced us and told him to move round so we could all sit down. ‘And let me get you both a drink on the house, to welcome you to Mossby. That is,’ she added, ‘if you are staying and not intending to put the place straight on to the market?’
The House of Hopes and Dreams Page 16
