A Crowded Coffin(12)

He avoided the marquee set up at the entrance to the great hall, and brushed moss and twigs off an old stone seat to rest for a bit. Locksley Farm Place would do very well, he thought. It was a good place to recuperate and to stay while he looked for a place of his own; and where better to keep the promise he had made, the promise he intended to keep, no matter what? For a moment a memory ran up against the brick wall of his will; no point in dwelling on the past, not just now at any rate.

His eyes narrowed as he frowned, thinking about the old man and his assertion that someone had deliberately tried to run him down. Rory agreed with Edith that Mr Attlin was neither senile nor hysterical. The body might be ageing but the intellect was as sharp as any Rory had encountered.

Just as Edith had done, the old man had drawn a sharp breath when he first encountered his proposed lodger, while Mrs Attlin had lost colour and looked badly shaken. There had been no time yet for anyone to explain what it was about him that affected them so badly, even at a second meeting, but from Rory’s point of view it was all to the good. The old chap clearly trusted him, and the old lady was warming to him, though she kept shooting glances at him when she thought she was unobserved, and now Edith too seemed disposed to take him on trust.

‘Morning,’ came a greeting. ‘You’re out and about early today.’

‘Hi, Edith.’ He nodded to her and brushed more moss off the seat. She sat down and gazed with satisfaction at the house. Above the ancient studded door to the mediaeval hall the angel design, inlaid in dressed flint, glittered as it was lanced by sunlight. ‘Tell me about the house, will you?’

‘Do you like it? It’s just an old farmhouse with a couple of quirks, really.’ She waved a hand towards the old building. From the front it looked like a solid farmhouse, possibly Georgian in style, faced in cream render.

The view from the rear had surprised him during his earlier perambulations. It was clear that the major part of the house was actually Tudor, but that nobody had bothered to render the old red brick, and the stone mullions were left intact; only the front, the part that showed, had been modernized. At a right angle stood the ancient hall, built in mellow, greying stone with the original porch close to the far end, with what appeared to be some battlements added randomly on the top.

It wasn’t as big as he’d thought on his preliminary visit; it was the extensions added, seemingly with no design in mind, that made the house seem to sprawl.

‘Here, I spotted you from my bedroom window wandering about so I brought you this little old book. I thought you might find it interesting; it tells you a bit about the house.’

‘Great, thanks. Highways and Byways of Hampshire by the Rev’d Sebastian Spilshaw. Let’s have a look.

‘“The property known as Locksley Farm Place has been indiscriminately altered by succeeding owners so that now very little remains of the original apart from the small but interesting Great Hall with its handsome cruck-built timber roof. One aspect of interest to the antiquarian is that it is said to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited residences in England. The Attlin family claims descent from the original Roman who built a villa, long since vanished, although a curiously shaped stone, said to resemble an angel, remains in what is whimsically referred to as the Burial Field.” Hmm, when was he writing this? Oh, I see, 1873.’

Rory flicked through the gilt-edged pages then referred back to the section on Locksley Farm Place. ‘What else does he say about the house?

‘“The family claim that in Saxon times a house was built on the current site is unlikely to have any foundation in reality, as no evidence of this building is available. What is not open to question is that an application was made to the king, Edward I, in the late thirteenth century, requesting a licence to ‘crenellate’ a building on this spot. Such a licence was duly granted but the fortifications were on a modest scale and were never needed under siege.”

‘I think it’s amazing,’ Rory announced, looking up at the house, before going back to the book. ‘He’s a bit dismissive of the rest of the house, isn’t he? “The mediaeval Great Hall (so called, although it is, in fact, of merely domestic proportions) now lies to the rear of a Tudor residence, originally of brick and stone, built in 1506. However, this modest edifice was criminally altered, in 1804. At that time Simon Attlin Esq. knocked down internal walls and enlarged the rooms, thus destroying all traces of the antique panelling. He also had the exterior of the Tudor building rendered and the windows replaced so that, in appearance, it now resembles any other undistinguished late Georgian farmhouse and is of no interest at all to the antiquarian.”