“Here’s my concept of what the Tudor garden might have looked like,” he said.

Lucy saw a sketch of the valley with a manor house standing at the top of the hill, Gunpowder Barn below and the fields and paddocks unfolding around it. It looked familiar and yet different; the contours of the landscape were the same but the features quite different.

“I wish I could draw as well as that,” Cleo said enviously. “Look at the house! What a perfect little manor it was!”

“That’s all notional, I’m afraid,” Finn said. “We don’t know exactly what it looked like back in the sixteenth century. Charlie was working on that, trying to put together an image from various different descriptions. It’s difficult because there are no contemporary paintings and very few references to it.”

Lucy pointed to what looked like a canal in front of the barn buildings. “Is that a moat? I thought they usually encircled a house?”

Finn nodded. “It could be a moat—we’re not sure yet, though we have found evidence of clay-lined ditches. We can’t excavate the area at the front of the barn because there’s the duck pond on the other side of the public footpath and it’s fed by springs from the hillside so it would be too expensive and difficult to drain. But sometimes Tudor gardens were surrounded by a shallow moat or a canal. Water features like that would provide an opportunity to row amongst the flowers and shrubs, giving you a different view of the gardens. People kept fish in the moat as well sometimes.”

Cleo leaned closer, eyes alight, her irritation with Lucy evidently forgotten. “That sounds idyllic,” she said. “So you would stroll down the hill from the manor house and have all these pleasure grounds around you? Awesome.”

“Pleasure grounds is exactly right,” Finn said, smiling. He glanced back at Lucy. “I don’t suppose that either of you know what was on this site before the barn was converted, do you?”

Lucy frowned, trying to recall what the rest of the estate had looked like when she and Cleo had visited as children. “I think they were just farm buildings, weren’t they?” she asked her sister. “They were very tumbledown. We weren’t allowed to play down here because they were derelict and it was too dangerous.”

“Verity had a couple of them demolished when the barn was converted,” Cleo agreed. “But I don’t think they were very old—Victorian, maybe, or early twentieth century at the latest. I think they were part of the kitchen gardens.”

“Maybe there was something else on the site here before they were built, then,” Finn said. “A remnant of the earlier garden, perhaps.”

“Wouldn’t the builders have uncovered some evidence when they converted the barn, though?” Lucy asked. She felt Cleo looking at her disapprovingly and added hastily, “I mean, I’d love it to be true, but with all that demolition and rebuilding, surely something would have shown up?”

“They did find a few interesting artifacts,” Finn said. “Enough to suggest that something was here but nothing diagnostic. And they didn’t disturb the original foundations, so it’s possible that something lies beneath the current building.” He measured the house with an expert eye. “It’s a nice flat area and a good size. There could have been some sort of building that was a part of the original garden design, maybe something important like a banqueting house.” He frowned. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, though. It might have been too grand.”