Page 52 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
‘That may have given them the idea …’ admitted Lulu. ‘There is a bit of free licence, in the way of ghostly goings-on in Halfhidden.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I’m all for a bit of imagination.’
‘On the way to the farm, the visitors can make a small diversion over a stile and across a field to an outcrop of rocks where the Mossby Worm used to hang out,’ Cam continued. ‘Some kind of dragon.’
‘Every village should have one,’ Carey said gravely.
‘Unfortunately, the new trail is a dead end at the moment,’ Lulu said, ‘so the visitors would have to walk back the way they came. But there used to be a way from the farm track down to Mossby, though it hasn’t been used for a long time, so I wrote to Mr Revell, asking if he might be interested in being the next destination on the ghost trail.’
‘I bet that went down like a lead balloon,’ Carey said. ‘My uncleseemed to prefer living like a hermit, and under sufferance only let a couple of coach parties a year have a look at the old part of the house.’
‘Yes, he told me that in no uncertain terms! It was such a pity, because I know there’s a real ghost legend there. And if people will be able to visit Mossby, then they could carry on down the drive and along the road back here afterwards.’
‘Iwrote twice to Carey’s uncle soon after I moved to Lancashire, asking for permission to view some stained glass in the Arts and Crafts part of the house, which I had a particular interest in, but he refused me, too,’ I said.
‘Never mind, Angelique, you can drool over the Jessie Kaye windows as much as you like now,’ said Carey.
‘Mightyoube interested in making Mossby part of the ghost trail, then?’ Lulu asked him hopefully.
‘It’s a possibility, because I need to make the place pay its own way. I already have plans to turn the renovations into a new TV series, a bit like my old one, but on a much bigger scale.’
‘That sounds like fun,’ Lulu said. ‘We loved your cottage series, didn’t we, Cam?’
He nodded. ‘The new series, with that actor bloke presenting, just isn’t going to be the same. People liked watching you get stuck in and work, not ponce about waffling about architecture.’
‘That’s what I liked doing, and I don’t mind being filmed working on the house, but I don’t want to open the Arts and Crafts part to the public, because it’s my home, after all.’
‘Some places on the ghost trail open only from Easter to late September,’ Cam said. ‘That’s when Lulu’s Haunted Holidays and Weekends run. There aren’t so many visitors the rest of the year.’
‘The ghosts are in the Elizabethan bit, too, Carey,’ I pointed out. ‘And you could rope off the parts of the grounds that you didn’t want people to wander down on opening days.’
‘Good idea. I wouldn’t want them drowning themselves in the lake, or getting brained by a falling rotten tree branch in the woods,’ he said. ‘And I suppose the house only needs to open part of the week, too.’
‘Thursday to Monday, say two till four in the afternoon, to get thelong weekenders?’ I suggested. ‘And Mrs Danvers could show people round and sell them postcards and souvenirs.’
‘Mrs Danvers?’ repeated Cam.
‘She’s Mrs Parry really; that’s just a silly joke,’ Carey explained.
‘She and her husband live in the Lodge. He gardens and she used to housekeep for Carey’s uncle.’
‘We know them by sight, but they don’t come to the pub,’ Lulu said.
‘You’ll both have to come and see the Elizabethan wing,’ Carey suggested. ‘The main ghost seems to be a seventeenth-century one, Lady Anne Revell, who hangs out in the haunted bedchamber, and there’s a family legend that if the stained-glass window she had made is ever removed, some sort of doom will fall on the family.’
‘It’s a very unusual window for its time anyway,’ I enthused. ‘Well worth seeing.’
‘The first thing Angel’s going to do when her workshop is up and running is mend the Lady Anne window, because a bird flew into it,’ Carey told them.
‘Reluctantly, because it should really go to a specialist glass conservator.’
‘No way! I’m definitely not risking the family curse. I feel I’m dicing with death just having it taken to the workshop.’
‘Is it badly damaged?’ asked Cam.
‘Some of the small panes at the top are cracked and one shattered. It might be a bit tricky preserving as much as possible of the original.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Cam said, so I described some of the techniques that were used to conserve and repair old glass.
