And indeed the house was woken, and has never slept since: the trespasser was Daphne Du Maurier, and the house slumbered on until she began to write Rebecca, with Menabilly rechristened Manderley. It was, she said, "like the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale, until someone should come to wake her". Here she stood, gazing at white windows shuttered fast and grey walls concealed behind tapestries of ivy. The Cornish sea was pink with sunrise, and blackbirds were singing in the hedge a five-kilometre path unwound between banks of scarlet rhododendrons, and the lawn was wet with dew. Early one morning, almost a century ago, a young woman trespassed on the grounds of a house called Menabilly.
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