Page 47 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
‘Why, it reminds me of nothing so much as a sampler,’ I said. ‘You know, where one sews little bits of pattern or flowers and other motifs to see the effect.’
‘I had not thought of that before, but you are quite right,’ Father agreed.
‘There are samplers hung in the muniment room below, some of them of great age, so perhaps she drew inspiration from those,’ Mr Revell suggested.
He led the way downstairs, through a huge and impressive hall, hung with pikes and halberds and mutely attended by empty suits of armour, then along a short passage to the muniment room.
I would have liked to have lingered to examine the samplers there, though they hung on a dark wall and were difficult to make out – but time had scurried by on silent mouse feet and as we returned to the light and airy new house, the gong sounded for luncheon.
18
Dimly Illuminated
Carey switched on wall lights, which had been made to look like candle sconces, but the bulbs were dim and only faintly illuminated the room.
‘The blinds are usually kept down in here to stop the sun fading the seventeenth-century bed hangings,’ he said. ‘You can date when the electricity was put in by the fact that all the sockets are two-pin brown Bakelite ones. If those coach parties ever visited on dark days, it must have been like playing blind man’s bluff.’
‘I seem to recall it was quite gloomy upstairs, though we weren’t shown this room.’
I’d have remembered the large stone fireplace, which must back on to the one in the tower, the dark linenfold half-panelling and the intricately moulded white ceiling. The bed was vast, with a heavily carved headboard.
‘What are those figures carved into the bedhead?’ I asked, peering more closely.
‘Hard to say, though it looks like a man and a woman. But presumably this was the nuptial bed of the Revells. I’ll open the blinds and bring a torch next time we visit and you can have a better look. Not all the soft furnishings in this wing are as old as these, though there are a couple of really ancient tapestries in the Great Hall and a collection of framed samplers in the muniment room.’
‘Samplers?’ I asked, interested.
‘Oh, yes – I’d forgotten you collect them. The Revell ladies all seem to have been industrious needlewomen.’
‘I’ll look forward to seeing those,’ I said, then shivered. ‘There’s a strange atmosphere in here, don’t you think?’
‘There’s certainly acoldatmosphere. The central heating doesn’t extend this far, so there are just a few ancient electric storage heaters dotted about to keep the damp away. This wing wasn’t used once the new building was completed, apart from the muniment room, which was my uncle’s library and office until he became bed bound.’
‘New storage heaters would be more cost effective, but maybe when you’ve had the old electric sockets replaced,’ I suggested. ‘Those sound dangerous.’
‘There are adaptors, so you can use three-pin plugs, but it’s a bit of a deathtrap at the moment,’ Carey agreed. ‘A lot of the furniture was removed soon after Ella came here fifteen years ago, when my uncle decided to allow the occasional coach party to visit. I don’t think there’s anything later than the eighteenth century in here now.’
‘I wonder what he did with it. After all, practically everything in the new part was designed and made for it, so none of it’s there.’
‘I wondered that, and I’m sort of hoping it’s in one of the attics,’ he said, his eyes gleaming. ‘Though not in this part of the house, because there isn’t much of a roof space.’
‘How have you managed to stop yourself from searching the other attics?’
‘Because I feel just like I did when there was a present under the Christmas tree and I was afraid to open it in case it wasn’t what I really wanted.’
‘But there might be nothing there at all, if your uncle got rid of anything he thought redundant. Or else he kept it, but it’s all monstrously huge and heavy Victorian mahogany.’
‘What a happy thought,’ he said, closing the door behind us and then leading the way into a wooden-floored gallery that ran along the back of the house. There were wall brackets that might once have held burning torches, but now were fitted with funny little curly light fittings, like whipped ice-cream cones.
A warren of small rooms led off it, including one set out as a nursery that I remembered seeing on my last visit, with an ancient cradle standing near the hearth.
The windows were all diamond paned in thick, greenish, uneven glass that distorted the view and there were unexpected steps up and down, and twists and turns, in the bewilderingly random way of many such old properties.
Finally, we arrived at the top of the main staircase, which was unusual in that the flight up from the hall divided into two at a half-landing, where the real attraction for me lay: the five leaded windows.
They were quite narrow, with pointed tops, and started at about the level of my chin. ‘I’ll need a stepladder …’ I muttered, standing on tiptoe to see what I could: it looked as if they had been made in three panels, the top triangular one being the smallest. There was a plastic margarine tub on the ledge under the central window, containing a few broken fragments of glass. I squinted up again, trying to make out where the damage was.
‘You shall have a ladder and yours truly to hold it steady …later,’ Carey promised. ‘As part of that great big survey of the whole place we’re going to make, remember?’
