Free Unsuitable Men by Pippa Wright

late.
    ‘For a country that is so totally obsessed with tea,’ confided Lance, leading me through the door to the Palladian wing, ‘it is beyond impossible to find a skinny soy
chai latte anywhere around here. Sometimes I don’t know how Bibi stands it.’
    ‘How long has she lived in England?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh, years,’ said Lance, dragging me through the Victorian Gothic revival wing far too fast – I had no time to look at the imitation fan-vaulting on the ceiling, let alone the
crenellated thrones that, although they looked medieval, had (said Martha’s dossier) in fact seated a mere two generations of Delavals. ‘Bibi came to St Martin’s for fashion
school when she was twenty and never left. Now you’d think she was born here, am I right? That accent! Uh-mazing, just like Madonna.’
    I murmured a non-committal sound of polite agreement; now was not the time to debate Madonna’s mastery, or lack thereof, of the English accent. In any case, I barely had the chance to say
anything as Lance rattled through the schedule he had set up and told me how he saw the feature taking shape. I made a few feeble attempts to interject with Martha’s instructions, waving the
dossier at him as if I could club him into submission with its sheer weight, but although Lance would leap willingly on each idea, he subsequently flattened it in minutes. Since he had been, as he
told me, a regular visitor to the house over the five years of restoration, it was impossible for me to deny that he had a far better knowledge than I of how to show it to its best advantage. I
wondered if Martha herself would have been able to resist his bulldozing excitability – perhaps she could have steered him towards her own ends, but I doubted it. Even she, I felt, would have
realized, in the face of Lance Garcia, that the dossier I waved had now turned into a flag of surrender.
    The renovations had been conducted in a way that was guaranteed to thrill the Country Hous e reader. The duke and duchess had declined to use a large firm of interior decorators in favour
of many small teams of artisans. Father-and-son carpenters had recreated the wooden stairs of the ancient hall by hand. The prayer cushions for the chapel had each been individually hand-stitched
to show local landmarks and the Delaval coat of arms. Paints and dyes had been created according to traditional methods – there was woad here, and elderberry, and a yellow made from onion
skins. Weaving had been done by two sixty-something women who called themselves, inevitably, Warp and Weft. Lance had spent the last few years photographing the work’s progress in timeless
black and white: a hymn to craft and tradition. I noted, leafing through his portfolio, that he had even photographed the plumbers, but most likely because they were exceptionally good-looking
rather than amazing craftsmen. Despite Martha’s instructions, I had to admit that Lance’s emphasis on traditional crafts bettered her ideas: his black and white photographs would form
the basis of the piece, while he and I would create a few full-colour tableaux that showed off the finished results as romantically as possible to appeal to moneyed brides.
    ‘The chapel, the chapel, the chapel,’ chanted Lance, whisking me out of the covered walkway and on to a gravel path that wound through a copse of ancient yew. ‘You know,’
he confided, ‘the family legend says that each of these trees – some of them are over a thousand years old – contains the soul of a knight who laid down his life in
battle.’
    ‘Which battle?’ I asked breathlessly, looking around me at the looming trees, already captivated by the history of it all.
    Lance shrugged. ‘Like I know. But imagine the trees lit up with fairy lights, right?’ he said. ‘Or even, maybe, along the path, flaming torches in braziers? You can see it,
right?’
    And I could – it would be romantic and mysterious, although perhaps fairy lights were a