The Priest's Cottage 1 of 2

Right.

So Angelika would clean my clothes. We had a deal.

She stood up, and walked away, saying nothing more, crunching on the lawn of the West Garden, and back to the Manor in the distant mist.

Well then. I stood up and clapped, wrung my hands a bit,  put on the wellies. I needed to go back to my room and get changed.

My room. Ah. The first few days at the Convent I was allowed to stay in the majestic "Oriel Chamber". Look up there, reader. It was just above the main gate. The other image below is a map of the Manor, and no, you are not "here", but I was "there". Not a good map I admit, but the best I could find. Ha! "Car park"? That was the tennis court, where I had matched another once - so fateful -  on the court. Now, now it is a "car park".

Yes. My first room. The Oriel Chamber. Resplendent stained-glass windows (which are still a subject of scholarship to some) that would wake me in the morning with a splash of prismatic colors (more on that glass later, since it told a story of poor Lady Gage and her three dead lovers - she evidently, it is written, witnessed their successive suicides from that same window). Wood-paneled walls, and a leather-padded door. A portrait of Charles II embedded, staring at me. It was next to the "Queen Elizabeth Chamber" - so called because she was rumored to have visited the Manor once. It was not a nice visit. Her strategy was to bankrupt Catholic land-owners with the cost of her huge retinue. It's true.

Even though I was a gardener, I was allowed at first to stay there. I was a Yank, after all, and from an unusual and interesting religious persuasion the nuns were ignorant of (take that Swedenborgians and you Quakers). I felt privileged.

Unfortunately, there was soon an abnormal "incident" involving myself and Angelika during a Catholic foot-washing ceremony (John 13:14-17). Not my fault, mind you, reader. Those long legs stretched, a deep sigh, and those toenails before me and above the basin were painted bright red and I...oh, nevermind. I had a wash-cloth. The ceremonial cleaning was supposed to take a minute. We took at least 30. In the Chapel. Impatient nuns observing. What did I know? Gimme a break. I was a Protestant.

After that, I was politely informed by the nuns that I would from now on be staying at the Priest's Cottage.

Next, a description of the Priest's Cottage. And then the laundry chamber in the main Manor.