We Are Misled Around a Manor House

At last! At last!  A day with nothing to do in it! Add sunshine, and smile!

I am sure you are as tired of hearing about the travails of house renovation as I am of writing about it. The good news is that we have finished all the decision-making and ordering of stuff.  I have to put in a plug for that wonderful woman, Ingrid Sloane, who assisted us at Wayne Tile in Ramsey, NJ.  She worked with us on making our selections till ten minutes after she was supposed to be out of there on a Friday evening.  After we'd finally left her in peace, she went out of her way to work on totting up an estimate for us after the store had closed and then spent another 45 minutes with us when we returned on Saturday, finalizing the sale, checking details, walking around the store with us to lay the floor tile we'd picked against the wall tiles we'd wanted, finding a better bullnose to match the marble than what we had originally chosen, and even managing to give us a slight discount on the bill. She was so kind, so professional, and so truly interested in making sure we would be happy with the final result. The minute she saw us, she hurried over to say, "I am so glad you're back - I found something that I think will work better, and I'd like to show it to you."

Thanks to Ingrid, we will have beautiful bathrooms.  And, more importantly, thank to Ingrid, today we had our first weekend day free of Renovation Obsessions in God-only-knows-how-long.  Since the weather was cooperating, we decided to frisk.

It happened to be the one day of the month that the New Jersey Botanical Garden opens up the manor house on the property to the public.  A vast Tudor-style edifice of the type that only the super-rich of the 1920's and earlier seemed to build (entire 16th century rooms were snapped up at European rummage sales, brought over by boat, and installed in the mansion, much to the dismay of the architect, who had to keep adding more house as the chatelaine of the place, a Mrs. Salomon - that's right, as in "Salomon Brothers" - found another bargain she simply couldn't resist), Skylands Manor is quite the impressive little country home.  The breakfast room alone sports a three-tiered marble baptismal font the length of a coffin (improbably bedizened with naked cherubs) which the inhabitants, in a whimsical mood, used to bank with hothouse flowers.  There are 16th century Swiss and German stained glass medallions set into quite a few of the mullioned windows, and you could certainly roast a couple of dozen oxen in the fireplaces, if company were to turn up unexpectedly.

The library is a lovely room but, unhappily, the place is leased to a catering firm that hosts weddings and other events, and the caterers' idea of simulating a baronial library is to stock the shelves with Reader's Digest Condensed Books, odd volumes of the Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia, and other horrors that shall go unnamed here.  Let's put it this way - there was nothing on the bookshelves I was tempted to stick under my jacket.  Which is probably just as well, because somebody's abandoned drink from last night's revelry was still on one of the shelves, right in front of a hardcover copy of Jackie Collins' Lucky.

I will probably be accused of snobbery for this, but - it does seem to me that, if you are going to be a docent and lead people around on tours, it behooves you to get your facts straight and not misinform the populace -unless, of course, you plan to do it in grand style, as did Dame Maggie Smith in dear Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage.  Our docent was kindly and well-intentioned, but she employed the word medieval with wild abandon as a description of everything from the baptismal font to a Jacobean linen press (by the time we are in the Jacobean era, we are talking late English Renaissance).  Even the imported millstone that forms the rear doorstep had no choice but to be medieval.

My  ability to exercise restraint of tongue and pen was sorely tested once again when our guide asserted that  Dieu et mon droit  (carved over the fireplace) means God is on my right and that, furthermore, the motto is Scottish in origin and was  introduced to England upon the ascent of the first Stuart king, James I.  In fact, it means God and my right; it was the battle cry of Richard I ("the Lionheart") in 1198, and later Henry V (who reigned 1413-1422) adopted it as the motto on the British monarchy's coat of arms. It refers the the divine right of kings, in short, and not to somewhat presumptuous seating arrangements at a dinner table that would place the King of England at the head of the table, right above God. Dear James I reigned in England from 1603-1625 and his arms bore the motto Beati Pacifici - blessed are the peacemakers.  In his memory, then, I did not contradict the lady whose -er - medieval French was so sadly not all that it could be.

It was in the library that she told us of the ghost who walks the premises - the ghost, in fact, of the departed housekeeper, who has been spotted upstairs in the bedrooms from time to time. (You can rent one of the bedrooms from the very caterers who have such idiosyncratic taste in literature, and keep a watch for her yourself.)  I ventured a small pleasantry - "I assume that would be the ghost of Mrs. Danvers?"  Several members of our party chuckled, but our guide was flustered and wanted to know whether Mrs. Danvers had ever worked for the Vanderbilts or the Morgans?  I tried to ignore the rumblings that betokened  that Daphne DuMaurier and Alfred Hitchcock were spinning in their graves, and politely told her I was referring to a fictional character - a sinister housekeeper who was wont to lurk about pining for the good old days under the aegis of the first Mrs. DeWinter, a certain Rebecca,  in a novel of that name that had once been rather well-known.

Undoubtedly, the unhappy housekeeper now walks and wrings her hands because the caterers are slovenly about leaving unattended stemware on the bookshelves.