Ribblestrop by Andy Mulligan Read Free Book Online

left of a home that must, once upon a time, have been quite splendid. Over the centuries, famous people had worked on both grounds and buildings. Two hundred men had dug the lake. Another two hundred had built railway lines to quarry the stone; grottoes, temples, and follies had been added. The south tower had been extended upward, with gargoyles carved under mock battlements. It had once been a gorgeous place to live, and Lady Vyner had been born there—delivered squealing onto an eiderdown, which she still slept under today. She had danced with two prime ministers, including Mr. Winston Churchill, who had planned a small part of World War Two in an underground bunker specially built by the war office. Legend had it that the tunnels beneath Ribblestrop connected thesebunkers to Whitehall in London. Legend also said that there had once been a train that ferried Cyril Vyner (her husband) and his wartime cronies backward and forward, and that plans of national importance had been incubated deep in the vaults.
    All that was in the past. Lady Vyner had vowed never to sell her home unless, she said, “the family honor is at stake.” Fifteen years ago, soon after her husband’s death, the family honor had been very much at stake. The estate had been losing money. Lady Vyner had filled her white Rolls-Royce with the last few decent antiques she could find, intending to sell them. Drunk on champagne, she’d got lost in Knightsbridge. Doing a three-point turn outside Harrods, her foot slipped off the brake and she reversed the car straight through a plate-glass window. When the police looked hard at her load, they found that many of the antiques had been pilfered during the Second World War—nothing to do with Mr. Churchill, but something very much to do with Lord Vyner and his trips across France and Germany. When the police get their teeth into that sort of scandal, they chew you to pieces—so Lady Vyner decided to sell.
    â€œIt’s bricks and mortar,” she said. “Nothing stays the same, we’ll put it on the market. Let the bidding begin!”
    â€œI’m not sure it will be so easy,” said Mr. Cromby, of Cromby and Cromby, London agent to the Vyner family since seventeen-something. “It won’t be easy in the current climate.”
    It wasn’t easy. Nobody bought it.
    People were interested, of course. They came piling up the drive to inspect. But the problem was Lady Vyner herself, who insisted she be allowed to keep rooms in the south tower on a complex lease agreement. Most buyers turned around quickly, especially as the vast majority were developers, who wanted to subdivide every cupboard into retirement flats. The price went down and down until eventually, five years prior to the present, it was bought by a donkey sanctuary. For a little while, it was successful and many donkeys enjoyed the happiest years of their lives at Ribblestrop. But the donkey people gathered debts. They tried to diversify, andleased the west wing to St. Frideswide’s Brethren-of-the-Lost, a tiny band of monks that dedicated themselves to prayer and fasting.
    But the coffers were low and cracks were appearing in the courtyards. Bits of tower would occasionally plummet to the ground and the gardens were turning to jungle. The donkey staff didn’t get paid; the donkeys themselves got thinner. The monks moved underground and ran out of rent money. Everyone could see that Ribblestrop Towers was ruined, just as Lady Vyner was ruined.
    It was at exactly this time that Dr. Norcross-Webb came on the scene.
    He had cut a controversial figure in the world of education, pioneering the idea that children learned best away from the desk. He ran a small school in Suffolk, and it was—it has to be said—getting smaller under his guidance. He had said, at a packed parents’ meeting, that children learned best underwater. It was a chance remark based on an experiment he’d conducted