Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray
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course. In your book.’ My reply was clipped. I didn’t know why I was resisting her need to be believed. Normally I considered myself to be a relatively unassuming sort of person, easily inspired. Today, I was ready to defend myself, or defend my uncle’s integrity, or Robert or someone, until I shook myself out of the distracting memory of that bus ride, and worked a little harder at being nice.
I became the person I was meant to be. I asked in a better tone, ‘Did Mr Ashbrook manage it?’
Jacqueline beamed. She was the sort of woman whose happier emotions dominated her face. She had extraordinary cheekbones and her eyebrows were arched and set very high, and they rose whenever she engaged with her obsession.
Then she dampened it all by admitting ruefully, ‘I think Graham Hanley Ashbrook was dreaming of the day when he could let loose a domestic herd of giraffes to roam upon the lawn outside his library window with their heads about the height of the rosebushes. But in truth it takes many generations to breed a miniature version of a species.’
Her gaze swept about the coach house. I knew she was imagining better proof than a few nameless pipes on the wall. Then she remarked briskly, ‘Breeders of miniature animals aren’t seeking dwarfism, you understand? Graham picked his stud giraffes carefully from the Kenyan stock. They were small for their kind, but it takes a lot of selective breeding to create a truly miniature one, and then it has to have other small animals to breed with to make it genetically secure.’
‘And are they slow to mature?’
She nodded. ‘Normal sized giraffes don’t breed until they are about six years old.’
‘So how many giraffes did he have?’
I could see that she approved of the question. She told me, ‘At its peak, Graham’s herd had four males and eleven females but he’d died before half of them had calved even once here. Walter John Ashbrook carried on with the herd until his own death in 1895. He must have had at least some success because that year his son sold two males to a zoo where they promptly died. We know the family still had three females in 1914 because a private park in Bedfordshire wrote to ask about them.’
‘Perhaps they had an inkling of what would happen to the herd if Graham’s great-grandson met his end leading a charge from the trenches?’ I supplied gently.
‘Which he promptly did. We don’t know whether this park took them or not.’ She paused while she turned to me.
‘And,’ she added with relish, ‘we don’t know how tall they were.’
I could hear the whisper of the wind upon the roof tiles. For the first time I could feel a sense of the legacy her beloved Ashbrook might have left. Not just this tale of giant animals gradually shrinking. But all those generations of Ashbrooks who had come after him to leave their own traces behind in this house. They were all here, even if only in the alterations to a few windows here and there on the façade of the house.
Jacqueline’s passion was infectious. Deliberately so, I thought. She knew what effect her little tour was having and she knew what she was doing when she examined her watch. ‘I’ll give you a quick walk through the house, shall I? Then we’ll hurry back while it’s dry to look at those edits.’
She led me out of the coach house and across the yard to a small door that opened into what appeared to have originally been the kitchen cold store. There were stone shelves and the walls were rather green.
She was saying, ‘You can see why I had to write about Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s work, can’t you? His story is bound to be “discovered” when this house is finally restored to some of its former glory, and it’s just begging for me to do it first. The son Walter John Ashbrook always meant to write it himself but between you and me, he wasn’t a terribly communicative fellow. This hall and the stairwell are the oldest parts of the house. As you can see, the young patients of the wartime hospital weren’t vandals but still they couldn’t help but leave their mark. It’ll come though, I’m sure.’
Now I truly was awestruck. In the sense that for Jacqueline there was no pause in her commitment to the Ashbrook legacy. She didn’t see the death of this space in quite the same final way I did. To me it looked awfully like this house’s soul had been cut out.
Inside was bare. Like a whitewashed prison rather than a place dedicated to health. This wintery day was never going to show this place at its best, but I couldn’t imagine the poor invalided children ever being warm here. Every painting, every wall panel and detail had been removed, brutally in some places, presumably for their own protection.
I asked, ‘Where did you find this history and the photographs? They certainly can’t have been conveniently left lying about for you to discover when you arrived?’
‘The local historical society. The village took custody of the family’s personal archive shortly after the last Ashbrook died in the Great War. The papers are very fragmentary because I gather all the really important documents from Graham’s research were given to a London college years before. But the archive does include a portrait of Graham Hanley Ashbrook as a young man. He had wonderful curling hair.’
She didn’t take me upstairs. The rise to the first floor was damaged and the few doors I could see up there hung open onto rooms that were empty of everything except the occasional workman’s ladder. She was adding, ‘My husband says—’
‘Your husband?’
‘Well, yes. Andrew did the latest read through of the book. He found all those last minute errors.’
She cast me a slanting look as if she had just unwittingly given away a secret. But not, it must be said, the secret I was thinking of. She had no idea we’d suspected her of being a victim of a wartime tragedy.
She swept across the foot of the stairs and in through a set of narrow folding doors. This room was as empty as all the rest but it had a splendid view across a lawn to the faint line of a ha-ha.
‘This was the library,’ she said with emphasis, because I think she was a little bit in love with this Graham Hanley Ashbrook, and this would have been his domain. There were no rosebushes outside the window for his giraffes to graze now. Jacqueline was adding, ‘Andrew’s gone back to help his father in our Blaze Hotel today, but the renovations here are our project. His father’s leaving this one to Andrew completely.’
Standing in this room that carried no real hint of warmth or old charm for me, I suddenly knew where the secret lay. ‘Oh,’ I said on a warmer note of dawning understanding, ‘This place is going to be a hotel.’
This was the detail she had omitted to share before. It made her unflinching commitment to the expense of her book make better sense.
You see, I knew the Blaze Hotel. It was near Bristol and it belonged to a chain of hotels that marketed themselves solely upon their panache for occupying a formerly derelict mansion and donning its history like an elegant robe.
Blaze Hotel was terribly near Blaise Castle and traded shamelessly upon all possible connections with that place. Or at least it had done until it had been required during the war to temporarily house engineering officers from the Royal Navy training base.
My husband had been billeted there during his eight weeks of training at HMS Bristol. It had kept the valuable new recruits safely out of range of the terrible blitz that had pounded the city – the same blitz, in fact, that my sister and I had endured for all that time on a daily basis as we had scurried to our respective places of work.
Knowing the tomfoolery of my husband’s fellow seafaring engineers, and the number of men who must have been housed there during the years that followed, I doubted very much that the Blaze Hotel had been returned to its owners in a better state than this place.
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