Most visitors to Grenada don't venture very far north of its capital, St. George's, a small, hilly port town near the southern tip of the island. The excellent beaches—Grande Anse, Morne Rouge, and Pink Gin among them—the pampering resorts, the good restaurants, and a café that serves a creamy cappuccino worthy of Rome, exert a kind of gravitational pull that takes an effort to escape.

But head north along the eastern coastal road and that effort is rewarded with endless views of the sea; the occasional fisherman walking along and swinging his catch, silver and glinting in the sun; and the smell of chicken sizzling on barbecues along the road for hungry passersby. Grenada's roads are good, and the island is only twenty-one miles long and twelve miles wide, which means you can drive around it in less than a day. If you're lucky, you'll round the corner that brings Grenville town into view when the late-afternoon light is warm and golden, and the sea is a marbled blue, and the whitecaps are foaming and lit from within, the way they look in a Winslow Homer seascape. In about another half hour, if you take your time, you'll come to Morne Fendue, a handsome planter's home built around 1910 of local stone mortared with lime and molasses, a confection that has held solidly through three major hurricanes in the past fifty years.

I'm greeted as soon as I step out of my car by three small dogs and one very large woman wearing an apron. "Hello. My name is Agatha, as in Agatha Christie. Now, come see the lovely view." She leads me to a lookout point off the open-air dining patio, where before me I see a sweeping, jungly valley of banana palms and pink flowering flamboyant trees stretching for miles to the green peaks of Mount Saint Catherine. To the right, in the distance, the village of Sauteurs lines the northernmost Caribbean coast. We stand there quietly for a few moments taking it all in, until Agatha offers to show me to my room, one of thirteen in a two-story annex built beside the house.

From the 1940s to the 1990s, no royal or head of state came to Grenada without stopping at Morne Fendue. Its owner, Betty Mascoll, was born in England but lived in Grenada most of her life, where she was a philanthropist, an adviser to government leaders, and active in civic affairs. Today, her home is a museum and a labor of love for Dr. Jean Thompson, a tall and imposing Grenadian woman of a certain age who was Mascoll's physician and who bought the house ten years ago, after her death. Dr. Thompson takes me on a tour of the house, showing me the room where Princess Margaret slept (with whom, she didn't say) and pausing at a cabinet full of citations given to Mascoll for her work with the Red Cross and other charities. "She was a lady, a hero, and a legend." Dr. Thompson shows me a couple of crude outbuildings that are the beginnings of an Arawak village she is creating, and which she hopes will soon become a regular stop for tourists.