Free Sowing Secrets by Trisha Ashley

they wanted it in instalments to live on in their retirement, so it’s suiting us all round – except Sian.’
    ‘She’s not married?’ asked Rhodri.
    ‘No, though she’s been through men like a dose of salts,’ Nia said. ‘Works for a newspaper down in Cardiff.’
    While we had been talking we seemed to have demolished a plate of pastries between us, though I suddenly had a deep yearning for one of Carrie’s luscious gingerbread dragons, with scales in scalloped red icing … I think this is what comes of deciding to diet: all I can think about now is food.
    ‘I think we should all go up to Plas Gwyn and see what fresh ideas we can come up with on site,’ suggested Nia. ‘Maybe see what’s stored in the attic.’
    ‘That would take more than one afternoon,’ Rhodri said, ‘but we could have a quick look now.’
    Rhodri wanted to pay for everything but we insisted on going thirds, and I took the money up to the till. I emerged from the teashop five minutes later rather sheepishly holding a paper bag.
    Being the smallest one, I sat crammed into the back of Rhodri’s impractical old Spyder sports car. ‘Have to swap this for something more useful, Rhodri, like an old Land Rover,’ Nia said, and he winced. I don’t think she will divorce him from his car; that’s one bridge too far.
    Halfway up the drive we met his cousin Dottie (whose name is quite apt) riding towards us on a large bay horse with three white socks.
    She halted next to the car and looked down at us disapprovingly, especially me with a half-eaten gingerbread dragon in one hand. ‘Came to see you, Roddy – didn’t think you’d be out gallivantin’ with gels when the house is falling to rack and ruin around you. And you the last of the Gwyn-Whatmires!’
    ‘Did you want anything in particular, Dottie?’ he asked, wincing again.
    ‘Cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Made it myself. Come on, Rollover!’
    Fortunately she seemed to be addressing the horse, for it moved off skittishly sideways, was gathered in and trotted briskly off.
    I was glad the drive was short, because I was starting to feel a bit queasy, and tossed the dragon’s tail out into the bushes for the squirrels. Come to that, this last couple of weeks I’ve felt odder and odder. Am I coming down with something? It’s that sort of brink-of-illness feeling – or maybe brink-of-overdue-period feeling? I’m so erratic, and it always makes me feel bloated and strange.
    Yes, come to think of it, I’m sure that’s what it is, because I’m Emotionally Weird, always a sign.

Grand Designs
    Plas Gwyn is a collection of mossy, ancient grey stones that evolved haphazardly round three sides of a paved courtyard. The oldest part is the three-storeyed hall, with the solar tower poking up above the roof and Zéphirine Drouhin and the knotty trunks of old wisteria entwined around its nether regions; then there is the seventeenth-century wing where Rhodri would have his private apartments, and the stables and outbuildings of various kinds, ripe, as Nia pointed out, for conversion into studios, gift shop and refreshment room.
    The cast-off furnishings of centuries were stored on the top floor of the hall, which opened right into the roof and was accessible by a twisty stair that made you wonder how they carried some of the larger pieces of redundant furniture up there – and how some of them were to be got down again.
    ‘The thing is,’ Nia said, as we finished our tour of the main house and passed through a low door and down two well-worn stone steps into what was once the kitchen, ‘you need to channel the visitors around so that they
have
to exit through here into a gift shop. Then they step out into the courtyard and there will be the tearoom and the workshops in the old stables – more lovely spending opportunities! And in the summer you could put little iron tables and chairs outside here.’
    ‘I’d need to employ people, though – there’d be wages to pay,’ Rhodri pointed