The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,83
told there was an even earlier building on the site and you can still see part of it incorporated in the later structure.’
‘It sounds fascinating,’ Treena said, and Ned suggested we all go back there for coffee and he would give us a quick guided tour of the interesting bits.
‘Coffee?’ I said dubiously, and he raised one fair eyebrow.
‘Good coffee. I’ve got a machine now that does it all at the press of a button or two – foolproof.’
‘You can’t go that far wrong with a cafetière, like in the office,’ I pointed out, but men do seem to like their gadgets, and the more complicated, the better.
Still, I’d been longing to see inside Old Grace Hall, without wanting to suggest he showed me alone, in case it brought back any lingering worries about my being dangerously neurotic. But there was safety in numbers, so here was my opportunity!
Ned put on the lights as soon as we entered the house, illuminating the long passage that opened before us, with doors off it on either side and a narrow, worn wooden staircase that vanished upwards into darkness.
‘I hope you aren’t going to be too disappointed with the interior,’ Ned said, ‘because most of it was remodelled in the thirties and forties. Several of the smaller rooms were knocked into one.’
‘I suppose they could do that kind of thing with impunity before you had to get Listed Building permission,’ Luke said.
‘Yes, I think an Englishman’s home was still his castle back then. The house isn’t in too bad a shape structurally, but inside it’s very shabby and needs some replastering, painting and decorating. I just don’t have the time or the money to spare from the garden, right now.’
‘Or the skill, when it comes to things like plastering,’ I pointed out. I’d happily help him do things like that later, if he’d let me …
‘The Hall appears to have started out as a much humbler dwelling, with a room on either side of a cross passage,’ Ned said. ‘One side was for the animals and the other, the family. It developed from that and was rebuilt later into the Tudor house you see now. There’s a wing, added around the early eighteenth century, where the kitchen and dining room are now.’
Luke was looking with interest at some stones sticking out of the wall below the stairs, which he said looked like the remains of an earlier stone one. ‘So it may have been bigger and perhaps fortified in its earlier incarnation,’ he added.
Ned opened a door on the right to show us a parlour that had been knocked through all the way to the back of the house and made into a sort of library-cum-study. It was quite cosy, with a log-burner, a big desk and modern lamps and some squishy chairs.
Some of the upright beams from the dividing wall that had been removed had been left in place, presumably to support the upper structure, and both they and the beams of the ceiling were huge and had odd bits cut out of them.
‘Family legend says that the beams are all from ships that have been broken up. The Grace family had shipping interests in the past, when it was built, even if they thought “trade” was a dirty word later.’
On the other side of the hall was another big room, with long windows at the back onto the terrace, the walls painted a soft sage green, and the furnishings of a vintage gentlemen’s club variety. It was all quite Agatha Christie; you could stage a nice murder in there.
‘It must have been a warren before it was opened up a bit,’ said Treena.
‘The rooms between this part and the new wing still are, though the kitchen was modernized around the seventies and the electrics have been upgraded fairly recently.’
He didn’t seem to mind Luke poking about and examining beams and exposed bits of wall, or the carving over the huge fireplace, which incorporated a galleon like the one on the sundial.
‘I think that’s the sign of Nathaniel Grace,’ I suggested, and then told Treena and Luke that Ned had a buccaneering ancestor.
‘He was one of those Elizabethan seafaring men who sailed close to being a pirate, but so long as he only attacked Spanish vessels and kept the Queen sweet with occasional gifts of looted jewellery, she turned a blind eye,’ Ned said. ‘He married and retired here – bought it from his cousin, after he’d moved his family to Risings.’