The House of Hopes and Dreams

by Trisha Ashley

  By then, a bright, wintry sunlight was pouring into the room, lightening my mood and making me count my blessings: here I was in my own workshop and living in a lovely house with my very best friend. How lucky was I?

  And if things changed … well, I had yet to explore the chauffeur’s flat over one of the stables, but whatever state it was in, I was sure it could be updated so I’d be able to move there when Carey found someone else to share Mossby with.

  Lunch up at the house was a scratch meal of the last of the party leftovers and lots of coffee to wake Carey, Nick and the gang up: they’d stayed up late in the old wing, waiting for an apparition that never appeared, while telling each other ghost stories so they jumped at every creak the old house made.

  But they quickly revived and were ready to film the Lady Anne window being removed, once Grant and Ivan had arrived.

  I was on tenterhooks watching as they carefully removed the three panels of the tall, narrow window and laid them on a board, even though putting in and taking out leaded lights was something they were well used to. Grant had previously measured the window opening and brought a sheet of plain glass to keep out the weather, until the old window was reinstalled.

  While they had the ladders up, Grant checked the tie bars, wires and mortar on the side windows, too, some of which were loose.

  ‘But they don’t look too bad at all. I think someone’s been up here and done a few repairs at some point. And the condition of the glass is surprisingly good, given the age.’

  ‘I expect the way the hill rises behind this wing protects it from the elements a bit. These panels certainly don’t look as if they’ve been exposed to the elements since the seventeenth century,’ I said, anxiously hovering over my treasures. ‘Well, apart from the hole the bird made.’

  ‘At least that’s in the small triangular top panel, so there’s just that one to repair,’ Grant said. ‘And now you’ve got the original cartoon, it should be a doddle.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure ‘doddle’ was the right word when it came to repairing priceless old windows, but I’d have to do my best. Carey helped me to transport it down to the workshop in the back of his estate car, leaving Ivan and Grant to finish glazing the empty window.

  Once the three precious panels had been transferred to a glazing table, I quite forgot I had an audience of Carey and the film crew and I took a rubbing of it to show the position of the leading. Then I propped each panel carefully against the clear plate glass on the easels over the studio windows and stood back to study them.

  ‘Everything’s watertight and shipshape up at the house, Angel,’ Grant’s voice announced, breaking into my reverie.

  ‘Oh … are you back?’ I said, turning round to find not only Ivan and Grant, but the film crew lined up watching me. ‘Thank you both for doing that.’

  ‘It was nowt,’ said Ivan. ‘Shall I make us all a cup of tea?’

  ‘That would be lovely, thank you. I don’t know where Carey’s got to.’

  ‘I think he went through the back room into his workshop,’ Nelson said. ‘I’ll give him a shout when the tea’s up.’

  ‘What exactly are you going to do with the window?’ asked Nick.

  ‘As little as possible. I only want to repair it, conserving what’s left and I have no intention of doing anything that can’t be undone later. An expert in glass restoration is coming over tomorrow to have a look at it and perhaps give me some advice – and by the way, I emailed and checked with her if she’d be happy to appear in the documentary and she said no, so you can’t film in here tomorrow.’

  Nick looked resigned. ‘Oh well, maybe we’ll do a bit more in the old wing instead – that priest-hole in the Great Hall, for a start.’

  ‘This window’s not in poor shape at all, considering,’ Grant said, having a closer look at the panels on the easel. ‘But you might as well re-lead all of it while we’ve got it down.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said. Taking an old window apart isn’t always the easiest of tasks. Sometimes you’re in luck and the lead and cement simply gently peel apart from the glass, or the cement has turned to dust and crumbles easily away. But occasionally it’s solidly accreted on and then you have to painstakingly remove it with a sharp blade, without damaging the glass.

  I hoped this would be an easier one.

  Over the tea, Carey promised to do his best to record the various stages of the repairs when the crew were not there, on the camera Jorge had loaned him. His filming had been a bit hit and miss so far, since when he’s flown with enthusiasm for something he entirely forgets to record it.

  Grant and Ivan went home after the tea, but I have no idea where the others got to. I went up to the house to make an exact black and white copy of the Lady Anne cartoon to take down to the workshop and saw no one.

  It was strange that the bird that’d broken the window appeared to have burst right through that strangely spiky sun, as if it had aimed for it.

  Perhaps it had.

  Next morning, Ivan and I began the task of carefully taking the panels apart, but it was slow work and we hadn’t got far by the time the expert arrived.

  She was a middle-aged woman, with curling ash-blonde hair, piercing light blue eyes and a severe and humourless manner. I was sure she knew her stuff, but suspected that the joy of working with coloured light had never touched her soul.

  While she was examining the window, I sent Ivan to winkle Carey out of his man cave next door, since any decisions on what to do with it were up to him. He came through, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

  ‘This is Grace Jakes, an old friend of Julian’s, who’s going to give us some advice,’ I said, introducing them. ‘Carey Revell, who owns Mossby.’

  ‘I’ve been cleaning up the pikes from the display in the Great Hall, so I’d better not shake hands,’ he said, but after a brief nod, she’d already turned back to the business in hand.

  ‘You have a very interesting window here, Mr Carey – unusual for its time in that it was designed by a woman and different in style to others of that period,’ she began.

  ‘Call me Carey,’ he suggested, giving her one of his blinding smiles. She blinked, as if a sudden flash of light had hurt her eyes, but was only briefly deflected from her lecture.

  ‘It’s therefore an important window and by rights, it should come to us to be properly restored and conserved by experts in the field.’

  ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want it restored, or glued together, or whatever else you experts get up to. Angel says there are a couple of cracked pieces, plus the shattered one, which luckily is cleanly broken into three, so she can lead it back together.’

  ‘That’s the old way, of course, using very narrow calmes, but the lines of the leads are intrusive,’ she said, then turned to look at the broken pieces of the sun, which I’d laid out on the small light-box. ‘However, if edge-to-edge bonding with resin was used instead, then it would look exactly as it was made.’

  ‘That’s not something I feel competent to do and, anyway, Julian said even the new resins would go yellow eventually,’ I objected. ‘We both actually preferred to see old windows repaired with lead calme – it added to the charm somehow, rather than detracted.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there, but on the other hand, if you decided to send the panel for professional restoration at some future point, there would be no problem undoing what you’d done.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘The glass is in surprisingly good condition – almost no pitting or discoloration.’

  ‘The hillside rises behind that wing, so it’s sheltered. It’s a mystery how a bird managed to fly into it at all, unless it had a death wish,’ Carey said.

  ‘Unfortunate. Do you intend attempting any kind of cleaning process before you re-lead the glass, Angelique?’

  ‘Not really, I thought I’d just wash it with distilled water and dry it.’

  She briefly closed her eyes,
as if in pain. ‘I brought some ionized water in the car, in case you hadn’t got any.’

  I shook my head. Not only did I not have any, I had no idea what it was.

  She fetched it in just as Carey vanished back into his cave and, though she seemed inclined to follow him in order to make a further attempt to persuade him to let her take the window away, I told her it was pointless.

  ‘Once he’s made his mind up, he’s totally stubborn. And also, you see, he’s a Revell, so I think he really believes the family would be cursed if you did that.’

  ‘I don’t hold with superstition,’ she said austerely, then went disapprovingly away.

  ‘Has she gone?’ Ivan whispered, sticking his silvery head round the door of the back room. ‘I took a scunner to her: she was just like my maths teacher when I was a boy. She tried to beat fractions into me with a ruler.’

  ‘Grace didn’t attempt any physical violence, but we’ve got to wash the pieces of the window glass in this special water.’

  ‘Eh, whatever next?’ he said.

  We carried on gently taking the panels apart, placing each piece of glass in its right position on the black and white cartoon I’d made and laid out on the other glazing bench.

  I continued for an hour or so after Ivan left, reluctant to stop, before locking up and returning to the house. There I found everyone in the kitchen as usual, with an open bottle of wine and the menus of the three local takeaways that delivered.

  ‘There you are,’ said Carey, looking up and smiling at me, as if my arrival was the only thing needed to make his life perfect, though, actually, that’s pretty much the way he always does smile at me.

  ‘We’re ordering food and then flagellating our artistic souls by watching the last of the Seamus Banyan Complete Cottage Catastrophes,’ he said. ‘Indian, Italian or Chinese?’

  Later, we all walked to the pub, where the crew described how Ella had almost caused them to have a mass heart attack earlier in the day, when they’d opened the priest-hole in the Great Hall and found her sitting there.

  ‘I mean, Carey showed us how it worked and it swung open, and there was this tall, dark figure with a white face and burning eyes, staring back at us,’ Sukes said.

  ‘What on earth was she doing in there?’

  ‘Cleaning, she said,’ Jorge put in. ‘But unless she was dusting the stone walls with her hands, I don’t know how.’

  ‘She grows stranger by the day,’ I said. ‘It’s beginning to get worrying.’

  ‘Jorge started filming her,’ Carey said.

  ‘Automatic reflex,’ he explained. ‘But she pushed past us without a word and went out of the front door.’

  ‘It was a bit … bizarre,’ Nick said. ‘Great bit of film, though – couldn’t have set it up better if we’d tried.’

  We had a pleasant evening at the pub and then, while walking home, Carey took my hand, which was nothing out of the ordinary. Holding hands, putting his arm round me, casual kisses … I told myself that it was all part of his tactile nature and meant nothing more than it ever had.

  Next day, after a couple of phone calls, there was a sudden change of plan and Carey went back to London with Nick and co. Apparently, there were things to sign, agents to see … and perhaps he’d meet up with Daisy, too? He hadn’t mentioned her since the party, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about her.

  Anyway, it wasn’t any of my business. It was just as well I’d realized the change in the way I felt about him wasn’t reciprocated, before I made a fool of myself and ruined our perfect friendship.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ he told me when they left. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’

  ‘Of course! I’ll be far too busy with the window to even register you’ve gone, though Fang had better put his boots on and come to the workshop with me,’ I added, ‘otherwise, I might get so engrossed I forget to go up and let him out.’

  I was so engaged with my work that I hardly missed Carey at all during the day. It was different in the evening, and Fang kept looking at me reproachfully, as if it was my fault he wasn’t there.

  But he returned on the train next day, saying everything was settled, though not whether that encompassed Daisy, too. Perhaps he hadn’t fallen under her spell again and it had just been a random kiss. But it had served to remind me that if it wasn’t Daisy, he’d soon fall for another leggy blonde in the same mould.

  Ivan and I had totally dismantled the Lady Anne window in his absence and over the next few days we cleaned each piece of glass.

  Ionized water seemed much like any other.

  There were thankfully no breaks anywhere except in the top panel. The cracks could be fixed with narrow ribbon lead calme – and so could the broken pieces of the sun, for the longest break helpfully ran along one of the spiky arms, making the mend less obtrusive.

  ‘We’ll need to trim the edge flanges a little bit to ease it in when it’s fixed,’ Ivan said, as we discussed it, ‘but that’s no great problem.’

  ‘That sun’s very odd when you really look,’ I said pensively gazing at it. ‘It’s more like a star … or a sparkling jewel.’

  ‘It all looks odd to me, what with these little bits of pattern and pictures painted in circles in the centres of the diamond quarries,’ Ivan said. ‘I’ve never seen owt like it: fiddly, I call it!’

  My head was so full of my work that I was probably boring Carey senseless with it, though he never looked bored. He popped in occasionally to film a bit of the process, but otherwise was engaged in his renovations – stripping the wallpaper in my bedroom and prepping it for painting. He’d sold his uncle’s old car to a nearby garage called Deals on Wheels and put the money towards his own camera. I just knew he’d permanently add his new skills to all the others.

  We’d settled back happily enough into our life together, immersed in our own affairs during the day, though each was interested in what the other was doing. Then, if no one else was staying, we’d often spend the evenings working in the studio. I was getting design ideas ready to submit for those two commission enquiries, as well as working on a series of sea-themed free-hanging roundels, so my book idea had been pushed temporarily on to the back burner.

  It was idyllic: a temporary idyll, perhaps, but all the more to be treasured for that.

  At last the glass was cleaned up and Ivan and I were ready to re-lead the three panels.

  The wooden side and top battens for each one were nailed to the glazing benches, the wide calmes for two sides of the borders cut and laid against them – and we were ready to begin.

  Soon, the only sound to be heard was the tapping in of the horseshoe nails that held each piece of glass firm, while we placed the next.

  Ivan worked on one panel and I the other, at adjoining tables, though I reserved the top and trickiest one for last – and it was somewhat of a joint effort, with Ivan standing by like a nurse in an operating theatre, ready to hand me the right size of calme, a horseshoe nail, or the next piece of glass as I worked towards the centre. There, the narrowest of calmes held the broken parts together, within the original boundary of wider lead that defined the diamond quarry – and the sun (or whatever it was) became whole again.

  I soldered all three panels with my new gas-cylinder-powered iron. I adore soldering – tinning the end of the iron, cleaning the lead joints with a wire brush, rubbing them with a tallow stick and then placing a neat round flat cap of solder on top of each. And this time, it was a real labour of love.

  When they were finally completed, we carried them with great care through to the cementing room at the back of the building, because there’s a lot of bend in a glass panel before it’s cemented and allowed to dry out.

  The thickly glutinous black mixture was brushed under the flanges of the leads, then a pointed stick run round the edge of each piece of glass to remove the excess. After that, whitening was sprinkled all over the panels to soak up the remains and then scrubbed off with a brush.

  The finish
ed panels, clean and shiny, went into a rack, to harden: one small window, so much work, but enjoyable and worthwhile. We felt we’d done a good job and we raised a toast in Old Spoggit Brown before Ivan went home for a well-deserved weekend off.

  Even on a sunny day it was gloomy enough to need a lantern in some of the rooms of the old wing, to which Ralph’s gas lighting had not reached.

  Nonetheless, I continued my search until one day, when I was in the room called Lady Anne’s bedchamber, examining the linenfold panelling, the folded top point of which was a frequently used motif in the window, I noticed that the bosses running just above it were carved with roses, another frequent symbol!

  But if the room concealed a hiding place, which of these to press, turn, or pull when the panelling went right round the room, was the question!

  In turning to survey the rest of the walls, my light happened to fall directly on to the massively carved bedhead, which I now saw depicted Adam and Eve in the Garden. What’s more, Eve seemed to be carrying a woven rush basket, presumably to hold the apples she had just gathered, one of which she was offering to her spouse.

  This was not a biblical story I was generally much in favour of, since it neatly unloaded the blame for the ensuing evils created by generations of men on to the shoulders of the innocent daughters of Eve.

  But now I peered closer, running my hands over the design. A circle containing just that very basketwork pattern had always appeared in the window quarries next to an apple. I set down the lantern next to the bed, kneeled on it and tried pressing and prodding and turning both … until finally, with a faint creak as of something long unused, the central panel slid aside revealing a dark and musty cavity.

  37

  Treasure Fever

  The next day being a Saturday, Louis turned up at the workshop to admire the windows on his way up to the house. He was going to help Carey with his various projects most weekends, until I had more work coming in and needed him.