Page 9 of A Recipe for Love
He didn’t reply.
Flinty did. ‘Aye. Well if you go through I’ve got things set out in the small dining room.’
The small dining room? That implied the existence of a larger dining room. ‘How many dining rooms do you have?’ she whispered.
‘Two?’ Adam replied.
‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘Well two dining rooms in the house. Plus the coach house, and they used to use the great hall for banquets.’
‘The great hall?’
Adam nodded. ‘It’s quite small.’ He caught her eye and, just for a second, sunny warm Adam broke through the tension. ‘Like an entry level great hall.’
‘Oh!’ Flinty called them back. ‘She doesn’t know yet.’ She nodded towards Bella. ‘About all this.’
‘Right.’ Adam pulled a face.
‘She?’ Bella asked.
‘My grandmother. She’s, well, she likes things done a certain way.’
Bella followed Adam from the kitchen into a large hallway. Adam pointed to the grand double-width doors opposite a wide staircase. ‘That’s the main door. Not sure when it was last used. It’s probably reserved for visiting royalty.’
‘Get a lot of those, do you?’
He shook his head. ‘Bit far from Balmoral for them to pop over for tea.’
The hallway walls were lined with paintings. The largest showed a square stone-built castle, surrounded by a high wall that extended out from the main building and, presumably, enclosed a courtyard out of view of the artist. Alongside that, just outside the wall another stone building faced the pathway that led to the castle. ‘Is that here?’
‘Yeah. Years old though.’ He pointed to the pathway. ‘That joins up with the road now, and someone – my great-grandfather maybe – extended the coach house and replaced the roof here.’ He pointed to the top of the castle. ‘So it doesn’t quite look like that any more. And there’s the dower house off the east wing, that you can’t see here.’
‘Dower house?’
‘Where the dowager lives. Built for the eighth baron’s mother I think.’
‘Right. So you have whole extra houses about the place and you live in the sort of castle people come and paint pictures of.’
Adam shrugged. ‘Not that many people.’
‘So this is the only painting of your house?’ she asked.
He did at least look slightly sheepish. ‘Well, it’s definitely the biggest,’ he replied.
The painting wasn’t the most striking thing in the hallway. The most striking thing was too much like something from a long-forgotten school trip for Bella to even begin to get her head around. ‘You know there’s a suit of armour at the bottom of your stairs?’
‘I am aware.’
‘Like where do you even buy something like that?’
Adam shook his head. ‘You don’t buy things like that. You just sort of have them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you do.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You can’t really get rid of them. Would you fancy taking Colin to the tip?’
‘The suit of armour is called Colin?’
