Fiercombe Manor (16 page)

“Nothing seems to keep time very well down in the valley. You're not late, my dear. You must be hungry—you didn't even stop for lunch.”

“I hope you didn't make anything for me. It's just that after Nan's breakfast, I was so full, and—”

“You're not to worry. No one was inconvenienced. However, you probably should eat more regularly, for the baby.”

She looked at me intently until I nodded meekly. I had the sense that she was trying to look inside me, and it made me uneasy. Really, she had been nothing but courteous since my arrival, and yet . . . I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that I had somehow disturbed the careful rhythms of the place. I couldn't articulate it any better than that.

“I'll make myself a sandwich tomorrow, I promise,” I said. “Nan didn't get round to showing me where everything is today, but I can ask her tomorrow.”

“Apart from Fridays, Nan is gone by lunchtime, so you'll have to catch her in the morning. She comes here early most days to build the fires and air the rooms and so on. On Fridays she dusts. There are other jobs she can't fit in and so I have to find time for, though, so you will be a help.”

She smiled gently, and I felt better.

“Now I'm afraid I got rather distracted during last night's dinner. I had some things I needed to tell you about the estate, and instead I must have bored you with stories of the past.”

“It wasn't boring at all. I loved hearing about all of it, about when you were a young maid. Like I said to Nan, I love stories from the past.”

“I suspect you are quite different from your mother in that.”

“Yes. She thinks I'm too romantic in that way, that I have a tendency to be morbid. I don't mean to sound critical of her, but she's completely unsentimental. No nonsense. Sometimes I think I would be better off if I were more like her.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose it's different, living in a city like London, but it's impossible to spend most of your life somewhere like Fiercombe and not be caught up in the past in some way. Things change more slowly here, and when they do, people are more reluctant to let the old ways go. I myself am wedded to this life. I'd probably be lost if everything was changed and new.”

As on the previous evening, Mrs. Jelphs had prepared a delicate-looking meal: a green salad served in shallow bowls of porcelain so thin they were translucent, poached whitefish, and new potatoes. I was even hungrier than I had been the night before, but I made myself politely sip some water before buttering a roll.

“Have you had a chance to explore any farther than the chapel yet?” said Mrs. Jelphs. “I really ought to show you some of the wider estate, but my back stops me from walking too far, I'm afraid. Perhaps you would like Ruck to show you the extent of the place, so you can take some gentle exercise when you're not helping me here?”

I couldn't think of anything more awkward than a solitary walk with the taciturn Ruck. I shook my head, a little too vigorously.

“It's fine, really, Mrs. Jelphs. It's a very good idea, but I like wandering by myself. Tomorrow I mean to get up earlier and have a walk before I begin my jobs for the day. If I'm going to be eating so well here, I'll need the exercise.”

“Well, if that's what you'd prefer. There are fairly flat paths through the beech woods that you could begin with. The boundaries of Fiercombe's land are all wooded, so you shouldn't find
yourself wandering farther than is sensible. Just make sure you let me know if you plan to go off by yourself. Will you do that?” She looked up at me, and it was there again, that intensity of expression that the subject matter didn't seem to warrant.

I nodded slowly, and that seemed to satisfy her. Her fierce expression faded, and she attempted a smile.

“If you had come to us a little earlier in the season, you could have seen the bluebells.”

“Oh, yes, Ruck mentioned them,” I said eagerly, glad that the mood had abruptly lightened again. “He said that people come from all over just to see them.”

“Yes, that's right, though not nearly so many as in the old days. There are a couple of steep, quite overgrown paths that start up in the village. It's private land here, you see, and we keep very limited opening hours for the garden, as I said last night. But we turn a blind eye during bluebell season—it has always been something of a tradition for people round here. As long as they don't trample them, I can't see that it does any harm. Sir Charles doesn't . . . well, he would prefer they didn't come, but he's here so rarely that it's a case of out of sight, out of mind.”

She paused, and I watched her hands as they distractedly folded and unfolded her napkin. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a slight tremor.

“Now, there is one thing I must warn you about. I should have told you straightaway—I've been rather remiss in not doing so. It's the old glasshouse—it's quite ruined, and you mustn't go near it. It's a way off from here, in the eastern part of the valley. The path that you will have come down on yesterday with Ruck continues beyond where you turned off by the kitchen garden. If you stay on it, through the woods and past a couple of empty cottages, you'll reach it. The glasshouse.”

She fell silent for so long that I became aware of the sound of my own chewing and swallowed a mouthful of bread embarrassingly noisily. In the end I spoke just to break the quiet.

“Why was it built so far from the house?”

“It wasn't,” she replied, her tone curt. As if realising this, she softened her expression. “I'm sorry, my dear. It's my age—I find myself remembering things from long ago more clearly than the present.”

I shook my head, confused. “No, please don't apologise. You must have so many memories stored up, and all of them of this one valley. Anyone would get lost in it sometimes. But I still don't understand. It sounds as though the glasshouse is quite a long way off, but you said it wasn't built far from the house. Is that right?”

Mrs. Jelphs frowned. “Do you remember I told you last night that everything was new when I first came to the valley?”

I nodded, leaning forward in my seat. I sensed that despite her obvious reluctance, she was at last going to reveal something of substance, and I couldn't hide my interest.

She sighed. “Well, the next generation—the present baronet, Sir Charles—hadn't long married when the title passed to him. He and . . . the new Lady Stanton were the first to live in this house for some years. It was the beginning of the new century.”

“Oh,” I said, puzzled. “So the manor had been closed up?”

“If it had been left empty for a few more hard winters, it would have been a ruin. However, Sir Charles was very fond of it—he had grown up here, of course—and so he decided to restore it as far as funds would allow. In truth, he didn't have much choice; by then there was no other house on the land to live in.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Jelphs, you must think I'm terribly stupid, but I don't understand. Where did the previous baronet—Sir Edward—live, if Fiercombe was almost a ruin?”

She was looking off into the distance again. It was to become a familiar sight that summer. I waited quietly, suspecting that too many interruptions would bring the conversation to a close.

“It really was in a terrible way,” she said finally. “The yews had been allowed to grow even higher than they are today; they were by some feet taller than the roof. I'm afraid Sir Edward used the manor as nothing more than a picturesque picnicking spot. The Victorians had so many fads and fashions, and one of them was to picnic beside a pretty ruin. The yews must have spoilt the vista somewhat, but it was quite the thing, I believe, to let an old house like this—still old even then, of course—go to rack and ruin, especially if you could afford to build a new one somewhere else on your land. Any sentimentality Sir Edward might have felt towards the house he'd grown up in was easily outweighed by his preference for all things new and innovative. Sir Edward wasn't a man who dwelt on the past.”

She lapsed into silence again, a long minute passing before she resumed.

“So Fiercombe Manor was almost lost, but then Sir Charles inherited the title from Sir Edward, who had never shown any interest in the manor. More than that, he didn't even like—”

“But didn't Sir Edward and Elizabeth have any children?” I broke in without thinking. “Surely they would have inherited? Or—”

But Mrs. Jelphs had continued to speak over me, her tone bright but brittle. “Now Sir Charles, as he became after his elder brother's death, thought quite differently about this old house. He was on the fringes of a particular set who wanted to preserve the simpler traditions of craftsmanship that the factories had been in danger of wiping out. This was the Arts and Crafts style of decoration that you saw in the chapel, and which he had loved as a boy.

“He had become an acquaintance of Charles Robert Ashbee, who—you might have heard of him—moved his guild of craftsmen from London to Chipping Campden in the northern Cotswolds around that time. This was 1901 or 1902—the very first years of this century, anyway.

“Ashbee or one or other of that group came here to visit around that time and, as Thomas would probably say, ‘went into raptures' about the manor and its magical setting. All its faults—its asymmetry, its derelict garden and sagging roof—they overlooked. All they saw was the craftsmanship that had gone into it over the centuries. Not only outside but in—it's not much known, but Fiercombe has some of the finest examples of early wall hangings anywhere. Despite the state of the roof, the house had remained surprisingly dry inside. The chapel they loved too, of course.

“So what money could be raised over the next few years—there was very little in the family coffers by then, and in truth, there is not an enormous amount now; Sir Charles has always lived quite frugally—was spent on patching Fiercombe Manor up and making it a family home once again. Despite my and Nan's efforts, though, it is becoming a little more threadbare each year Sir Charles stays away.”

She looked down, her fingers worrying her napkin again. “I think it must be a house that needs a family—children running and laughing in the dark passages, the stiff old casements open to the fresh air.”

I frowned, rather puzzled. “May I ask how old Sir Charles is? And his sons? Ruck mentioned yesterday something about them.”

Mrs. Jelphs's hand fluttered to the high collar at her throat. “Oh no, you have misunderstood. There are no boys now. He . . . well, Thomas is . . .” She stopped.

I shook my head, not yet able to disentangle all the strands.

“I know Sir Charles and Lady Stanton live in France now,” I said slowly. “Your letter to my mother said they lived abroad, and Ruck mentioned France. He told me Lady Stanton had been promised they would live there when the boys were older. I had forgotten: I suppose I got them all muddled in my head. You mentioned a Thomas . . .”

She smiled tentatively. “Thomas is the younger son. He is about your age now—no, a few years older, I would say. I have lost sight of the years myself.” She let go of her crumpled napkin and spread her hands.

“Anyway, the estate, what there was of it, passed to Sir Charles as the new century began. They lived a quiet sort of life, the life of an ordinary family. There is a little money—as I say, Sir Charles has always been very prudent—but they have lived a life far removed from the years that went before.

“In my first days as lady's maid in the valley, almost every week brought a different set of people. The valley is so steep that it's like an amphitheatre, and you could hear the chatter, glasses clinking, and the band, as clearly as if you'd been right in amongst the guests.”

As Mrs. Jelphs talked on, her accent slipped and blurred a little. She spoke in very correct, clipped tones usually, with no sign of the village roots I knew she had through the connection with my mother. Immersed in her memories from when she was only twenty or so, she regained her old voice, and the soft, loose Gloucestershire vowels that also became more pronounced in my mother when she'd had too many sherries at Christmas.

“Mrs. Wentworth was always happy to find me a job if I went down to the kitchens on nights like that, so if I wasn't serving, I would slip away to the other side of the Great Mead. There was a place there, slightly higher and across from where the house
once stood, where I could see them all in the distance. I couldn't really make out their faces from there, but I could hear them well enough.”

That was when everything clicked into place in my mind. “So you mean there was another house in those days?”

She looked at me blankly, as though she had forgotten I was there.

“Oh, yes, of course. I thought I said.”

Pausing, she seemed undecided whether to continue. I kept quiet, and eventually, with a sigh, she did.

“Stanton House, as it was called, was built at enormous expense in the 1880s, a great square house of almost forty rooms. It stood at the eastern end of the valley, facing the west, where the valley flattens out. It was built from hard grey granite, quite different from the local limestone, which didn't make the building of it any cheaper, of course. Each of those blocks had to be brought here by horse and cart.”

“I had no idea,” I said, vowing to explore the estate properly first thing in the morning to see what else was secreted away amongst the beeches and meadows. “Ruck mentioned a big house, but I thought he meant the manor. I wish I'd gone for a proper look around earlier now.”

“It's hardly worth it. There's very little to see. You'd have to know exactly where you were looking even to find the foundations.”

“But how can a great mansion have just gone like that?”

Mrs. Jelphs shook her head. “I believe there is only a single photograph left to prove that Stanton House ever stood. I saw it once in an old book that is probably out of print now. It was strange to see it again.”