Page 90 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
‘Want to come out to an architectural antiques place I’ve found, to look for a good old door for this hole?’ he asked enticingly.
‘Only if you wash the filth off your face first, and change out of the Postman Pat jumper, because on that scale he’s a bit scary,’ I said.
‘I’d better get down to the workshop early,’ I told him next morning. ‘They’re bringing the heavy-duty vinyl flooring and starting to lay it today. Are you going to come down and put in that nice old door and frame we found?’
But no, it seemed he was still in masonry demolishing mode.
‘I might get down later, but first I’m going to knock a hole in the wall between the back gate and the stile – or where the gates will be when they get back from their beauty treatment.’
‘What do you want a hole there for?’
‘To put in a small gate, for any ghost trail walkers who can’t get over the stile. I mean, if they’ve got gammy legs like me, or pushchairs or something, it would be a bit difficult, and I don’t want the big gates left open.’
I hoped he wasn’t overdoing it with the heavy work, but he seemed to be increasingly glowing with health and enthusiasm, and his stick now spent most of its time propped nearby, just in case.
I remembered that years ago he’d learned walling, including the intricate art of dry-stone walling, and loved it, so he was probably giving himself a treat.
‘Have fun,’ I said. ‘I might come up and see it later.’
A team of burly men arrived at the workshop in a large van just after I did and made short work of moving the heavy furnishings and laying the dark grey heavy-duty vinyl. Ivan kept their strength up with vats of builder’s tea and a box of assorted biscuits I’d laid in specially.
He offered them a lot of unwanted advice, too, while I pottered about filling in the random grooves and channels left by the electricians.
Once the flooring was down there was only really some touching up of the paintwork to be done in the glazing room and a few other small jobs. Soon I’d be ready to pin up theBig Wavedesign on the corkboard wall and think about scaling it up to full size.
But first, I was going to blow some of the competition money – even before I got it – on better door locks and a burglar alarm system.
Nat’s threats had made me permanently edgy.
One day, idly looking among the books in the muniment room, I discovered a slim, calf-bound and handwritten tome, which briefly narrated Lady Anne’s story.
She was a noble but impoverished widow with one daughter when she married Phillip Revell in the seventeenth century, having made an unfortunate runaway match the first time and been left penniless. She and her daughter had been grudgingly given a roof over their heads by her uncle, so I expect she was glad to exchange that situation for a good, if not grand, marriage.
The Civil War divided many families and her new husband fought on the King’s side, while her uncle almost immediately switched to the Parliamentarians.
After Phillip was killed in battle, she bore a son and continued to live at Mossby while, as I had already heard, the daughter of her first marriage subsequently went to live in some kind of Protestant religious order abroad.
I showed it to Honoria, who said she had read it, but there were family traditions that there had been more than met the eye in this dry outline. ‘There may be something more among the papers in the Spanish Chest in the muniment room,’ she added.
‘Which chest?’ I asked puzzled.
‘Oh, it is hidden in a secret place – the old house is supposed to be riddled with priest-holes, for the Revells were secretly papists a long time ago.’
She told me that although she had seen inside the concealed place in the muniment room, only Ralph knew how to open it, the secret having been passed down to him.
I had not before thought of there being secret hiding places at Mossby and found the idea very intriguing.
31
Mixed Messages
The end of January was surprisingly mild, but February roared in with an arctic blast, so it was lucky we’d finished stripping and undercoating the workshop’s outside paintwork, unblocked the gutters and mended a few cracks in the stucco, ready for it to be repainted white when the house was done in spring.
As the days passed, I heard nothing more from Nat and my life with Carey at Mossby began to settle into a basic pattern that was constantly overlaid by the interesting comings and goings of workmen and the friends and acquaintances who lent their help, and very often their specialist skills, for a few hours or even a day or two.
The electrician had moved his operations into the house, while Garry the plumber was installing a shower cubicle upstairs in a small room formerly used for making hot drinks and storing equipment by Carey’s uncle’s carers.
Garry and his silent lad had begun to appear frequently on Nick’s film, but in the guise of friends merely helping out. I’m sure Carey was often complicit in helping some of the workmen to cheat HMRC, but mostly he got the help he needed by bartering, of one kind or another, rather than the exchange of hard cash, so I don’t think he actually saw it like that.
