The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,78

we’d come to see.

It was definitely a lot bigger than the shop. There were two windows, obscured by dirt, and a wooden door that looked as if something had been chewing the bottom.

‘When Nathaniel Grace bought the original house it wasn’t very grand, so there’s no big carriage house, just an old barn and a couple of stables,’ Ned said.

‘Good heavens – where am I to keep my barouche and four matched grey horses, then?’ I demanded, and he grinned.

‘No idea, but you can park your car in the yard over there, if you want to, like Elf. And Jacob keeps his old Land Rover in the barn in winter when the track to his house is too difficult.’

‘Jacob’s house is a converted barn, isn’t it? Why is there a barn up there, in the woods, where it’s so steep?’

‘It wasn’t always wooded. They used to run sheep on it, I think. Maybe it was something to do with that … I don’t know. The track does carry on past it, because there’s a farm just over the ridge. You can hike up to the top of the woods and then along until you come out above the Fairy Falls eventually. It’s quite a trek.’

‘I might try that one day off, when I’m feeling energetic,’ I said, then turned to look at the building we’d come to see, with its squat and slightly belligerent air.

‘I don’t know what its original purpose was. It might have started out as a feed store or tackroom or something,’ Ned suggested, pushing open the gnawed door with a creak onto a gloom only slightly alleviated by the brownish light coming through the century of cobwebs and encrusted filth on the windows.

‘That doorway is quite wide, so they might have kept animals in here,’ I said.

‘Maybe, but going by the workbenches and that rusty vice, it’s been used as a workshop fairly recently.’

‘Recently as in about seventy years ago?’

I’d followed him in and stood in the middle of what I was already thinking of as the Grace Garden Shop and Visitor Centre. ‘This has lots of possibilities,’ I told him encouragingly, even if most of them were currently large, black and had lots of legs.

Luckily, I’m not in the least afraid of spiders, or other creepy-crawlies, most of which are very helpful to gardeners, and even those that aren’t, like Cabbage White caterpillars, provide a tasty meal for the birds.

‘This is a good, big space,’ I said approvingly, then spotted something. ‘It looks as if there might originally have been a door through into the other side.’ I went over to examine the wall more closely.

‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten. I spotted that from the other side when we were painting the shop walls. It looks like there was an opening through, then they filled it in when the lintel above it cracked.’

‘I don’t know how you managed to forget that, because it will make it much easier for us! It’ll just need much more support,’ I told him. ‘Apart from that, it looks in better shape inside than you’d expect, from the state of that door.’

‘I have no idea what they might have kept in here that could chew through thick wood,’ he said, eyeing it.

‘Maybe one of your madder ancestors?’ I suggested, and he gave me a look.

‘I really don’t see why you shouldn’t knock through the wall to the shop, with suitable supports put in, and that would more than double the current space, Ned.’

‘I think it would be quite a big job,’ he said dubiously. ‘Expensive.’

‘I’m sure any builder worth his salt could do it in no time,’ I said. ‘Ideally, the visitors should exit through the shop, so they’d have to walk past loads of lovely shopping opportunities on the way …’

‘I’m still not sure it would make enough to justify all the outlay converting it.’

‘Trust me, it will,’ I said confidently. ‘You’ll need to make the door from the courtyard wheelchair accessible with a short ramp, and then you can solve the loo situation, by having an easy access one at the back of this new part.’

‘Which loo situation?’ he demanded.

‘You have one outside loo for visitors and one for staff – that’s not going to cut the mustard when you have loads of visitors, some of them disabled, or needing baby-changing facilities.’

‘Baby-changing facilities?’ He looked horrified.

‘Don’t worry, there can be a flap-down baby-changing table in the new toilet cubicle, so it’s multi-functional.’

‘Oh … great,’ he muttered, looking worried. ‘Planning