Ship hadn’t let me down! The money she took from my parents had been returned to me! Two hundred thousand pounds! Enough to buy a modest semi-detached house in our part of the world – or enough to restore Ship House and begin the bed-and-breakfast business that Sapphire had always dreamed of. She’d drawn up an impressive business plan to prove to the solicitors that this was a reasonable use of my money. Sapphire was constantly surprising me these days.
The solicitors were so embarrassed at not having found the money in the first place that they waived their fees. I felt a bit guilty about that, but not too much so – and I certainly couldn’t explain it to them. They were the trustees for Ship House until I came of age, so we had to do everything through them, but they were very helpful about getting Ship House ready to move into. I don’t think the re-wiring would have been done half so quickly without them!We moved out of our old house and into a tiny rented place near Ship House as soon as we had the go-ahead for the B&B plan. The only person who had our new address was Granny Thomas.
While the re-wiring was being done, I started re-claiming my garden, while Harry and Sapphire planned the rest of the renovation in great detail.
We moved in as soon as the re-wiring was finished. Harry and Sapphire’s bedroom furniture looked odd in Ship House.
I had a new bed – my old bunk bed was nearing collapse! We camped out in the main bedrooms while Sapphire set about organising the top floor for our use.
I was beginning to feel like I never wanted to see another bramble as long as I lived but I was, slowly and steadily, getting them cleared. At the back of the house, anyway. The front was a completely different matter! But I was loving doing it. Sapphire was all for the vegetable patch and orchard being made more productive.“Any surplus, we can make jams, jellies, chutneys – and we can even sell them to visitors. And organic, home-grown food is really fashionable now. I think we’ll get some hens as well, when we’re ready, and have our own eggs.”
“You’ve done a fantastic job out here, Tallie,” Sapphire said, coming out to tell me that dinner was nearly ready. “The place is looking so different.”“So are you,” I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. I liked the changes though: she’d let her hair revert to something like its natural colour, and wasn’t bothering with make-up much at all.
“Before we eat, I’ll show you my plans for upstairs, and you can see if you like them.”
The barred windows had gone from the schoolroom and nursery – they were a fire hazard! Harry and Sapphire were having the old schoolroom as their bedroom as their bedroom, and Sapphire showed me what she was planning to do with the walls.“And then a lot of white bed-linen, I thought, with maybe just a little lilac. Now, one of those little front bedrooms is going to be our bathroom, and I thought you could have the other two. One as a bedroom and one as a study – you’ll need somewhere to work once term starts. Then we’ll use the other big room up here as a family sitting room, so you’ve got somewhere to bring friends. And then I’ve got some ideas for the downstairs rooms to show you…”
“Saff, how did you get to be so good at all this decorating and designing stuff and so on?”
It was a serious question. Sapphire was coming out with some brilliant ideas.“I told you this is my dream. This really is what I’ve always dreamt of doing – I’ve watched programmes about it, read magazines about it. This was what kept me going through the bad times before I met Harry. I’d plan this out, change my plans as trends changed. And there’s something about this house – something inspiring. Maybe it’s the fresh air, but I can think much more clearly here.”
And maybe it was the fresh air. Or maybe it was the last guerdon, answering to the name of Talisman Mallerby again.
“It was this light fitting, and the fireplace too, that inspired me. I thought we’d go for a real 1920’s Art Deco look for the room. What do you think, Tallie?”Aunt Violet. That was what I thought. Aunt Violet all over again. But this time, though I was still sad, remembering her and realising that she must be long dead, it didn’t hurt as much as it used to. This room was going to be the visitors’ sitting room, and they would have the dining room too. We’d keep the kitchen, and the study as well. As Sapphire said, this wasn’t going to be a paper-free job, and she’d need a room to work in. And a computer, for bookings and so on. Which I could teach her how to use. But she didn’t seem too fazed by all this.
Harry was our secret weapon. Or, more to the point, Harry’s cooking skills were our secret weapon. Even when he’d been working at the diner, cooking with really poor ingredients, he’d had customers coming back for more. Cooking with good food, Harry was unstoppable. And he loved it.
The kitchen had changed almost beyond recognition. I’d been sorry to see the old cupboards go – I’d painted them with such love and care – but Sapphire hadn’t got rid of them. She had plans for them, she said, and had them stored in the old stables. In its place was an industrial quality kitchen, where Harry could cook in large quantities.
“Okay,” Sapphire said. “The plumbers are coming tomorrow, to plumb in the new bathrooms, so we’ll have no water all day. But they can leave us a working toilet and cold water overnight.”“It’ll be like camping,” Harry said, laughing.
It’ll be like my first few days at Ship House, I thought.
“I thought we could all help Tallie in the garden and go out for something to eat in the evening. We can have a sandwich lunch.”
“I’ll make a salad or two first thing,” Harry said. “Then we could go and see the village properly.”
“And if the plumbers are quick, then we should easily get upstairs done by the time school starts for Tallie.”School! I’d nearly forgotten about it. New school, new teachers – it was a bit of a daunting thought for a moment.
“Can’t I just stay here and work here?”
“No,” Harry said firmly. He looked down at his plate. “I promised your mum that I’d do everything I could to take care of you. And you’ve probably done quite well in your exams.”
I didn’t know yet – the results wouldn’t be out until the end of August.
“So I’m not having you waste that good brain of yours. She always said your dad’s family had some clever people in it.”
And it was true: I knew it was. I’d met some of them!
Sapphire and I watered the plants early in the morning, while we still had water in the taps! Harry was busy filling buckets and bowls, so that we could flush the toilet later.“Then we’ll attack the last of those brambles in the orchard – and we’ll go out later. I must remember to change first.”
“You look fine like that.”
“Yes, but I don’t feel it! Not for meeting people anyway.”
I wasn’t so bothered about how I looked, but I knew it mattered to Sapphire.
“Mind you, I think I’m losing weight, despite being so hungry all the time. It’s all the activity!”
With the brambles gone, the orchard looked a lot better, though it was a bit short on the fruit trees. We were going to have to find out about new ones, and which varieties would do best here – something else to learn! And the walls needed fixing too – the chain-link fencing didn’t really add anything to the general feel of the place.
After we’d got changed, we went down into the village. I was really curious to see how it had changed – the house we’d rented had been in the other direction, and we’d been so non-stop busy that we’d hardly looked around at all. The blacksmith’s place was now The Old Forge Tearooms (and I have to say, they made a mean cake there!).
But it was the cluster of buildings around it that surprised me. Last time I’d seen the forge, there had been nothing near it, and now there was a higgledy-piggledy collection of buildings – a bookshop, a toyshop, a museum, some houses. I asked the waitress about them, and she said they were all little workshops at one point, back during the industrial revolution, but they’d been converted now to other uses.
Harry and Sapphire wanted to linger over their coffee and cake, but I went off by myself. I wanted to see what else had changed. Next big surprise was the rows of grimy back-to-backs I remembered from Talisman Malaby’s time. They had been transformed! Paint, flowers, loft conversions – these looked like nice little houses now.
I wandered over to the church and the graveyard next. There was a war memorial in the graveyard: I found Aunt Violet’s two brothers on it. And two more Mallerbys in the Second World War.
And then I found a memorial remembering “the beloved wife of Charles Mallerby, who lies in foreign soil.” Aunt Violet was probably here somewhere too – suddenly, I didn’t want to look any more.
The vicarage was called The Old Vicarage now. I guessed it had been sold to raise money. There was probably a nice modern vicarage somewhere else in the village.
I ran Sapphire to earth in the bookshop. It had been odd, seeing all these places I’d known in other times, and I felt a bit shaken by it all. Sapphire noticed that I was looking pale, but put it down to a lot of gardening on a warm day. And I wasn’t going to tell her the real reason!
The days flew by, each one busier than the one before. Sapphire got all the stuff that had been in Ship House out of storage.“We’ll see if there’s anything here that we can use or that you want to keep,” she said. “Then, if I were you, I’d sell the rest – there’s still quite a lot to do, especially outside. Though there’s no point in starting on the grounds at the front until all the workmen have finished. They’ll only trample everything to mud.”
It made sense to me, so we hung all the pictures up in the dining room and looked at them long and hard to help decide what we wanted to keep.
“Do you like it?” Sapphire asked, when she showed me the finished sitting room.“It’s fabulous!” And it was – colour, wallpaper, shutters, light fittings – it all went together perfectly.
“We’ll have it as the quiet sitting room – comfy chairs, books, magazines. I’m going to make a television room in one of the cellars, and we’ll put the television down there. We’ll get a small one for upstairs, for ourselves.” And that was yet more proof of Sapphire’s commitment to this project – she’d worked so hard for that television, and been so fond of it.
It was the beginning of September. My exam results had been fine – more than fine! I’d got an A* for maths and Latin (thank you, Miss Aislaby) and also Chemistry and History (thank you, professor!), and A for everything else. So I didn’t feel quite so nervous about the academic side of things. And the teachers I’d been to see last week were very flattering about the progress I’d made at my last school. The staff there had obviously written some pretty glowing things about me!This school had a uniform, and they were fairly strict about it too, but as I was going into the 6th form, I was allowed to wear discreet make-up and a little jewellery. I was all for skipping the make-up, but Sapphire said to wear just a little for the first few weeks.
“It makes you look like you take yourself seriously, and care about yourself. You don’t have to be orange; just a touch of colour is all you need.” And she’d shown me how to do it really subtly. I still had butterflies though, as I ate my breakfast! This was my last big hurdle.
