Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray
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around Mrs Peuse or Mrs P with this woman. She called me Lucy from the start. She was slender, aged about forty-five and swathed in a woollen jumper and slacks as only the terrifically elegant can be. She was living in the solitary gatehouse to an old park estate.
Finding it had been a simple case of deciding which of the innumerable villages on the Fairford road by the name of Ampney something-or-other was the stop I needed. The bus had set me down in a sleety shower by a river bordering the graveyard for a tiny, sinking church. The church had no tower because quite simply it would have capsized into the sodden ground. From there I had to trace the footpath across a narrow bridge and find the ridgetop drive that would have saved me a deal of trouble if only I’d had access to a car. At the tip of this drive was the lodge that housed Jacqueline.
‘I have to tell you,’ she said brightly, ‘that before I can allow you to discuss the edits in my book, you absolutely have to join the ranks of the initiates who appreciate the full truth behind my giraffe story.’
‘I do?’
Apparently, I did. These were the parts of her tale that hadn’t been deemed suitable for a light children’s history and it was hard to get her to even consider how little it mattered what I believed just so long as we got the book finished. She kept getting side-tracked into showing me old photographs of the way the park had been, before the last Ashbrook had been lost to the trenches of the Great War.
Finally, I gave in and asked, ‘The name is Ashbrook, then?’
I was sitting at her kitchen table and peering at a small black and white print of people in Victorian dress. They were standing on the front steps of a small country house that had been bleached to white by the glare of sunlight. The building was square to afford a good view over the surrounding parkland and its core was probably Tudor, but the house in the photograph consisted of three storeys of tall windows with various trimmings added on through time. The most impressive of these additions was the sweep of pillared and shaded steps to the broad front door.
She was tapping the centre of the image where a few men ranged between fine columns in tall hats and impressive beards. ‘That’s Walter John Ashbrook. He’s the son of Graham Hanley Ashbrook, the man who wrote “Fevers of Africa”. Do you know it?’
It was a common misconception that those of us who work with books must have devoured every work ever written. I was not, however, and never will be sufficiently well read to ever answer a question like that in the affirmative. I shook my head.
Jacqueline wasn’t impressed by my ignorance. She told me in an authoritative sort of way, ‘Graham Hanley Ashbrook inherited the most enormous Kenya estate. That’s where he nearly lost his assistant and closest friend to yellow fever. After the fellow’s recovery – which must in itself have been pretty remarkable – our man Graham was inspired to study the survival rate in the local population. He observed that travelling Englishmen tended to succumb almost instantly, whereas born and bred Kenyans had a better chance of pulling through. The study made for some pretty pioneering research into disease resistance. He published his book about it in 1865. These photographs were taken around that time, after Graham Hanley Ashbrook had retired to his English country estate. He was pretty frail by then so it was left to his son Walter John Ashbrook to try to preserve the family’s other great legacy.’
She left a suitable pause. Then she added, ‘A study of the management and care of the Ashbrook giraffes. This was the park where Graham kept them, naturally.’
‘Oh, naturally.’
I was studying the other characters in the photograph. There were three other men, all equally bearded and all of the calibre of clerks or estate managers with a few urchin-like children ranging about in the foreground. It looked like harvest time in a standard English summer and there were no giraffes in sight.
I asked, ‘How did you get this information? Your book doesn’t make that clear.’
Jacqueline beamed as though I had asked something particularly delightful. ‘Shall we walk up to the house? I’ll just go and pull on my boots.’
She left me blinking in the sudden peace of her kitchen. It was an angular room of the sort with a low ceiling where no two windows quite faced the same way. There was a short run of steps up to the living room which was narrow and hung with photographs – two boys in the uniform of the very smartest school in Cirencester and a father, who made me wonder suddenly if I’d blundered when I’d asked about her access to the details of the Ashbrook family. They might have come to her through her husband’s family.
There was not, I couldn’t help observing with a sense of doubt that was at odds with the simple homely clutter of family life, a photograph of the daughter Harriet Clare.
Jacqueline bustled me along the length of the ridgetop drive in what turned into a fierce rainstorm. Great pollarded lime trees towered leafless overhead.
She was wrapped in one of those enormous country jackets that made her look stylish even in a wintry squall. An oilskin hat drooped low over her loose hair. My own hair was twisted up under my hat. It had the sort of stiff brim that cut a deep slant across the eyes and it was a beloved remnant of my Bristol life, but kept irritating me today because it was threatening to fly off if I didn’t keep a hand on it. As we walked, my guide was shouting out between breath-stealing gusts the more recent history of the house.
‘The last Ashbrook,’ she told me, ‘met his end in 1916, unmarried and childless. Afterwards the house was passed about between distant heirs male, to stand empty for a few sad, lonely years. Then it was requisitioned at the outbreak of our recent war to house the patients of a London children’s hospital.’
‘I imagine, then,’ I shouted above the wind, ‘that it’s in a terrible state of repair, now that it’s been emptied of evacuees and returned to public ownership. Was that when you bought it?’
‘Absolutely. Do you recognise these steps from the photograph?’
We had reached that same flight of white stone steps between pillars from the photograph. I was met by dirty stonework and windows that stared with that blank coldness of decay.
But Jacqueline didn’t really care about the appearance of the place. She was interested in the stables which ranged behind.
The yard mirrored the house, in that it was arranged as a square and everything that was older had been retouched to suit Victorian tastes. It was entered by passing beneath a staggeringly grand arch that united the two wings of a coach house. The boundary was set by a sweeping run of roofs with masonry scrolls and small oval windows in delicate brickwork. It was utterly lovely. And private.
She observed reverently, ‘It would have been the perfect place to house the secret of a herd of giraffes, wouldn’t you say?’
I suspected that it had simply been designed as a means of saving the farm horses from draughts.
Jacqueline made it seem as though we were entering a cathedral when she hauled on a vast sliding door and led me into the coach house. She cautioned on a whisper, ‘This is where the workmen are storing their tools, so take care.’
This space was more than a simple chaos of tools. There was rubbish from the house that had been preserved because it was saleable for scrap. There was a shrouded old car acting as a relic from the last time the coach house had been put to its proper use. Beyond this was an impression that here was a tall building that was dry, with excellent light. But it didn’t smell of animals.
I had been braced, I think, to scent that strong musty smell that zoos and circuses have. This place smelled only of cold air made acidic by a few tins of paint.
‘Here,’ said Jacqueline, probing into a corner behind a stack of broken bedsteads. They looked like hospital bedsteads, of the sort that had sturdy cleanable frames for hygienic treatment wards.
Jacqueline was saying, ‘They chose this building for the giraffes because it was the only one tall enough. The coaches had to go elsewhere. I think that contraption in the corner there is an automatic watering trough. And those pipes running