Page 48 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
‘Oh, yes – that “break” you said I needed,’ I said snarkily, going down the bottom flight of stairs for the long-distance view of the windows.
‘Nice pair of heraldic crests in the two windows on the left,’ I said. ‘Probably contemporary with the building of this wing. The two on the right are a little later and I’d say a new panel with an escutcheon was put in at the top to replace a clear section, sometime in the seventeenth century. Those look like strawberry leaves, so that should mean someone of rather nobler blood marrying into the family,’ I added.
‘I think Lady Annewasof noble birth – she wouldn’t be addressed as Lady Anne, otherwise – but an impoverished widow, which is probably why she was happy to marry into the minor gentry.’
‘The Lady Anne window has the date it was made at the bottom,’ I observed. This was lucky, for it was nothing like any other seventeenth-century windows I’d ever seen, having a design of painted motifs in circles at the centre of each diamond pane. It was that that had made me think of a sampler, the first time I saw it. Now I was further away I noticed something had been taped over the damaged section at the top. ‘What did you say happened to it?’
‘An unfortunate bird flew into it – or at least, the remains were found below, so it was presumed so. Clem stopped up the gap to keep out the elements and the pieces were collected up and put in that box.’
‘The window was probably weakened already. I suspect the tie bars on all of them need some attention,’ I said absently. Each panel would originally have been tied with wires to a metal bar set horizontally across into the masonry, to keep it from sagging or bulging over the centuries, but they did tend eventually to break loose.
‘The Lady Anne window will definitely have to come out,’ I told him. ‘And as I’ve said before, you really should send it away to be professionally restored or conserved, because it’s a rare example of a seventeenth-century window. It’sreallydifferent from most glass of its time.’
‘No way is it ever leaving Mossby, or some dreadful doom will fall on the House of Revell,’ he said flippantly, but with an underlying seriousness.
‘Then you’d better hope the ghost counts the workshop as part of Mossby. Otherwise, no dice.’
‘I’m hoping I can loosely interpret Mossby to mean the whole estate, but if Lady Anne should pop out of the wainscoting while you’re removing it, perhaps you could assure her you’ll have it back in pristine condition in no time.’
I gave him a look.
‘Will you have to cut and paint new pieces of glass to repair it?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely not!’ I exclaimed, horrified. ‘I hope to reuse the broken pieces, leaded together with narrow ribbon calme. A specialist would have a lot more techniques to offer, like edge-bonding the pieces back together with clear resin, but I’m just going to conserve what’s there, not try and restore or renovate it.’
‘Sounds tricky, anyway,’ he said.
‘It will be … and I may have to take the whole window apart and re-lead it, while I’m at it.’ I mused over it for a moment and then added, ‘I might ask advice from a friend of Julian’s who works in glass conservation at York, before I start.’
And suddenly I really wanted Julian to be there to talk it over with. He’d have been as interested as I was in the design.
‘Come on, there’ll be plenty of time to moon over the windows later,’ Carey said briskly. ‘Let’s finish the whistle-stop tour.’
I think he was tiring, for his limp was more evident as we crossed the flagged Great Hall. The walls were decorated with ancient arms and vacant suits of armour … or at least, Ihopedthey were vacant.
‘There’s a kitchen of sorts at the other end and a few more rooms, but the rest of the service wing was demolished once the new house was finished,’ he explained.
‘Back in the days when your home was your unlisted castle and you could knock it about to suit yourself?’
‘Yes, you’d certainly never get away with it now, not even the lift in the tower. But I’ll restore it really sympathetically, in my usual wonderful way,’ he said modestly.
We passed through a dim parlour and along a passage to a door he had to unlock.
‘The muniment room,’ he said grandly, bowing me in. ‘This way, my lady!’
‘I have no idea what a muniment is,’ I confessed.
‘No, me neither. But somewhere in here is the secret hidey-hole that Mr Wilmslow will reveal tomorrow. There’s a priest-hole in the Great Hall somewhere, too, just big enough to hold a man, but that one is common knowledge.’
‘I vaguely remember we were shown that. It’s about the size of a glorified linen cupboard.’
‘They discovered another upstairs when they were knocking down the service wing. Behind a cupboard there was an entrance to a stair leading up to a room in the eaves. There are probably others too, because the family were originally Catholic at a time when that wasn’t a great idea.’
‘Didn’t you say the hiding place in here is full of family papers?’
‘Apparently they’ve just been stuffing them into an old chest for centuries.’
‘Sounds fascinating. Nick’s certainly going to want that in the series!The Mossby Secrets could be a whole chapter in your first book about the house, too.’
