“Well, we’ve all had a day of doing our own things,” Carl said as they sat around the kitchen table at five o’clock the next evening. “What have we learned about Henry? Skye, you first, what have you learned today?”
Skye’s first thoughts were of the many times she had sat at the same table, at about the same time of day, and Audrey had asked her that same question.
She wanted to say that she had learned a great deal, but she kept quiet. The day had flown by, a total contrast to the first days of the week, when the hours had dragged as Carl made his methodical way along the library shelves.
She spent the morning reading through the household diaries kept by Patience and Josephine and estate diaries kept by a series of fathers and sons called Wickens, breaking off every hour to make Carl the coffee he demanded. On her way back after one such trip down to the ground floor she had found three well-made wooden trunks under a dust sheet.
She had read the names on their lids with some disbelief. She wondered how they came to be hidden under a sheet, behind the door of the attic of The Lodge.
Unlike the one she had found in the damaged chimney these chests had no intricate hidden locking mechanism. They had opened easily and she had been able to spend the afternoon reading through the papers accumulated by Sir Bernard’s son Henry, his son Gussie and Gussie’s son Bertie.
She had learned a great deal about the lives of the three men who seemed never to have known each other but there was one item in Gussie’s chest, a notebook filled with gobbledegook, that she found particularly intriguing.
As she realised something of the importance of what she had found she wondered how she could make the biggest impression.
She had become frustrated that Carl had been right about the library and Fergal was far too successful researching the internet and the archives of his friend in the local historical society. And she had become intensely irritated at Carl’s constant demands that she supply him with endless mugs of coffee.
Audrey had always told her to ‘save the best till last’ and she decided to listen to all they had to report before telling them what she had found which would undoubtedly be more important than anything they may have learned.
“Bits and pieces, you know, things that just tell us what we already know,” she answered with a shrug of her shoulders.
“Such as?” Fergal asked encouragingly.
“I didn’t find anything about Henry or his side of the family,” she lied.
“How disappointing.”
Fergal detected sarcasm in Carl’s voice and hoped Skye had missed it.
Skye wondered if they could see she was not being honest. “Well what did you learn about Sir Henry in your day in the library?” she asked Carl pointedly.
“I have learned much about William’s love for his family.”
“All of them except his brother Henry, I bet,” Skye muttered, who had read a great deal about what Henry thought of his brother William.
Carl chose not to answer. Instead he turned to Fergal. “And what have you managed to discover about Henry?”
Fergal was disappointed that some of the early antagonism between Carl and Skye seemed to have resurfaced and he replied rather too enthusiastically. “I did get somewhere, quite a lot further really. Henry inherited Oakridge Court and the estate from his father when he was ten. It seems to be rather sad. Lady Constance Lacey died in childbirth in 1832 and then Sir Bernard died, four days later, in a ‘shooting accident’.”
“You say that as if it’s in inverted commas,” Skye commented.
“Well at least that is what the inquest report says. But I can’t see him going off shooting so soon after his wife and child died, can you?”
“You think he committed suicide?”
“They’d never say that, not in those days, especially if there was to be a church funeral, but it seems highly likely.”
“But he left his sons behind. Henry and William would be how old? Ten? Committing suicide would seem a particularly selfish way out.”
“Selfish or not Henry became Sir Henry and Claude Olivierre and his wife Patience were named the boys’ guardians. Anyway,” Fergal continued, “Oakridge was run by an Estate Manager, a chap called Wickens, until Henry came of age.”
Skye tried not to smile as she remembered the generations of Wickenses who had served the estates of Oakridge and The Lodge that she had read about in the household diaries that morning.
“Both boys were sent away to Winchester College which they left in 1839, both going up to Oxford. It appears that William progressed rather well there and Henry did not. They are both said to be resident at The Lodge in the census of 1841 so we can assume they spent their holidays with Claude and Patience. But in 1851 there’s no sign of either at Oakridge or The Lodge. We know that William was travelling but it seems Henry left too. As soon as he could, it seems, he first leased then sold the Oakridge Estate to a man called Ernest Vernon Gibson and moved to London.”
“That could be for all sorts of reasons,” Carl suggested. “Perhaps, after tasting the delights of Oxford, he fancied a more cosmopolitan existence.”
“He could just have bought a town house and spent time there when he wanted to be off the island. I thought it seemed a bit drastic to sell the family home.”
“Well it’s obvious isn’t it?” Skye had read the reason why Henry had left and why he had sold Oakridge for less than its true value, and she knew how angry he had been when Claude had allowed his daughter to choose William. “He wanted to marry Josephine and when she chose William he upped sticks and left in a huff.”
“Rather a romantic view I suspect.” Carl peered over his half-moon glasses disapprovingly. “And no doubt fashioned with the benefit of knowing that William did, in fact, marry Josephine.”
“But that’s what he said in his inscription in that bird book, wasn’t it?” Skye reminded Carl. “He wrote you chose me didn’t he?”
Carl nodded reluctantly.
“It may be a romantic view, but it is one that makes sense, surely?” Fergal added.
“Possibly,” the professor conceded before pressing his request for more real information. “Did you find what Sir Henry got up to in London?”
Fergal referred back to his iPad. “He seems to have led a pretty debauched life. He moved there in 1843 and he lived alone in an address in South Audley Street, Mayfair in the census of 1851. He married in 1855, aged thirty-three, a Mary Swann, aged twenty-one, spinster of Yattendon in Berkshire. As we know from the family tree, they had a son, Augustus, who was born in 1857 but Henry doesn’t appear to have lived with his family at all. Lady Mary Lacey appears in the census of 1861 at that property in South Audley Street with a boy, then aged three years, named Augustus Bernard, obviously Henry’s son, but there is no Sir Henry at that address. A Henry Lacey aged thirty-nine, which seems to fit our Henry, does appear in 1861 at an address in Cleveland Street, just off Fitzroy Square, along with three women described as ‘widows’. I haven’t been able to trace him in 1871 though he didn’t die until July 1878.”
“An unhappy man,” Skye said firmly. “He married someone who didn’t suit him just so he could get an heir and then as soon as he had one he left to get on with his life.”
“You have absolutely no evidence for that,” Carl told her sharply.
“But I bet it’s what happened,” Skye answered back, more determined than ever to leave her revelations until the end of the evening’s discussions.
Fergal broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “He seems to have done little with his life. He was a Member of Parliament up until 1868, a position he seems to have been given rather than something he particularly wanted as his name appears in Hansard only twice. Otherwise there isn’t much to go on. He died of a ‘paralytic fit’, probably what we would call a stroke, in July 1878, just after his fifty-sixth birthday and, interestingly enough, since they were twins, just a few weeks before William himself died.”
“So we seem to have that generation pretty much sewn up then,” Skye suggested.
“Far from it,” Carl contradicted her.
“Well we know that William is a sympathetic, intelligent and sensitive man who marries the woman he loves, while Henry, disappointed that he didn’t win his cousin’s hand, leaves his home to lead a life of waste and debauchery.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say we could prove any of that,” Carl snapped, before continuing with a more conciliatory voice. “Though I will agree there does seem to be a contrast between the lives of the two brothers.”
“But what about the next generation, Fergal? We know that Sir Henry had a son, the next baronet, but did he have any other children?” Skye asked, wanting to find out how much he had learned, so that she could show how much more than that she had discovered in the attics.
“Well…” Fergal took in a long breath as he opened the relevant document on his iPad. “It appears that Henry only had the one son, who became Sir Augustus and who we know as Gussie. I’ve been able to find out quite a lot about him and haven’t had a chance yet to go through it all. He had a short but interesting life. He served in South Africa, albeit in a staff job, and then, after a year, married his cousin, Lucille Swann. She was his mother’s brother’s daughter. He doesn’t seem to have followed his father into the club-based life of the rich titled male of the time as he was a member of the British Library.” He paused, noting Carl’s frown and Skye’s smile at his prejudices. “Anyway, soon after his marriage Gussie was the victim of a pretty horrific murder. The papers of the time carried long and detailed obituaries, not because of anything he did during his life, but because of the manner of his death and the fact that his young widow was expecting his child. The papers loved it and devoted pages to melodramatic twaddle. It will be a little difficult to work out what exactly happened but it seems he was the entirely innocent victim of a street mugging. They were quite common in the 1880s apparently.”
“So the press then were no better than they are today?” Carl said drily.
“Not really. Worse if anything because they just printed what they thought people wanted to read. I mean, they described Gussie as a war hero, though he was nothing of the sort, and they said Lady Lucille was near to death at the news of her husband’s death, which she patently wasn’t because she spent her pregnancy involved with litigation.”
“Litigation?”
“She fought for her child’s inheritance. There’s a mass of stuff about it in the law records. It’s not quite Jarndyce versus Jarndyce because it was all sorted out before the child was born but there were reams and reams of it in the papers. I’ve got all the links here but on a quick appraisal it seems that there was a lawyer called Iain McFarlane, a friend of Augustus’ from their time in South Africa and the only surviving executor of his will. This McFarlane appears to have represented Lady Lucille through months of argument in legal quarters about whether or not the unborn child could inherit. The title should, in many lawyers’ views, have lapsed. Even the Prime Minister of the time became involved though what Gladstone thought to gain I cannot imagine, other than his interest in the rights of women, The Married Women’s Property Acts were going through Parliament at the time.”
Skye listened carefully, as this information explained the files of legal papers she had found in the trunk with Sir Bertie’s name on it.
“What I also find interesting is that no one involved seems to have been aware of the Isle of Wight connection, not even those who should have known. There appears to have been a mix-up with the record-keeping since the two boys, being twins, had the same birthday and there is a lot of confusion, with Henry being referred to as ‘Henry William Lacey’ when we know he was Henry Claude.”
Skye had wondered who the ‘Henry William Lacey’ was who had signed so many of the papers in Sir Henry’s box. She had wondered if he could have been another of Henry’s sons but she had decided against that, he wouldn’t have given any son of his his brother’s name. But, Skye thought, the use of the name did make sense if Henry was trying to write William out of history.
“Anyway, it was finally agreed that the title could pass to Lucille’s child if it were a son, and if a daughter was born then the title would lapse.”
“Pretty typical,” Skye commented.
“That attitude is only just changing now so we can’t take too superior an attitude,” Carl cautioned. “But well done Fergal, we’re beginning to fill in some of the gaps.”
“Anyway,” Skye pressed Fergal, “what happened to the child who must have been Augustus the Second?”
“After all that litigation the child was a boy, the one we called Sir Augustus the Second. I lost him for a bit because I was looking for ‘Sir Augustus Lacey’ but it seems he was always called Albert or Bertie. Once I started looking for Sir Bertie or Sir Albert I found him.”
“What did he do?”
“Not very much actually. He appears to have lived most of his short life with his mother in Berkshire. He didn’t go to France, instead being given a desk job in the headquarters of his father’s regiment. Again his father’s executor, this Iain McFarlane, was involved.”
“I feel rather sorry for him,” Skye said sadly. “Bertie that is, not Iain,” she added quickly, recognising the name McFarlane from documents in both Gussie and Bertie’s boxes.
“Why do you say that?” Fergal asked, genuinely not understanding.
“I bet his mother kept him with her regardless of what he wanted to do with his life. She’d lost her husband after only a couple of months’ marriage. I mean she’d want to mollycoddle his son wouldn’t she? And then all he can do in the war is a safe office job when all around him men of his age are going off to France and being killed or horribly injured. He must have felt awful.” Skye worried that she had given too much away and Fergal would realise she had found something in the attics to back up her argument.
“We can’t know that.” Carl tried to keep a rein on what he saw as Skye’s imagination.
“Can’t we?” she asked rhetorically, then turned to Fergal. “So what happened to Bertie?”
“Like his father he also died an untimely death, he and a young woman were run over by a car in an air raid in November 1917. There was very little about it or him in the national papers but the local ones in Berkshire managed to find space for a couple of paragraphs. It was a pretty bloody time casualty-wise, so I’m not surprised they didn’t give much space to a simple road accident.”
“I didn’t know they had air raids then,” Skye admitted.
Carl answered her before Fergal could. “Not many but, yes, they occurred. Not a lucky family by all accounts and we need to know more about them.”
“Now, Skye, what is the first question from all that Fergal has found out that springs to your untutored mind?” Carl asked pointedly.
“Well.” She looked at the two men who clearly had no idea that she had known what she was talking about as she had coloured in detail through Fergal’s explanation of bare facts. “We need to know whether Henry could have passed anything on to his son about his family on Isle of Wight.”
“Why do we need to know that?”
“Henry will have inherited stuff from his father wouldn’t he?”
“You are too fond of that word,” Carl said firmly. “Find one that is more precise.”
“OK. Henry will have inherited family heirlooms, accoutrements, jewellery, estate papers and legal documents from his father wouldn’t he?” Skye said very deliberately. “And, if he did, could he have passed any of it on to his son or was it lost?”
“An interesting thought.” Carl nodded.
“And if he did would those papers have included something Sir Bernard himself may have written?” Skye pressed her advantage, realising that for the first time in what seemed like ages both Fergal and Carl were listening to her. “And if he did, where would those documents be?”
“Undoubtedly lost a long time ago,” said Carl decisively.
Skye ignored him, gaining in confidence because of her find. “But Henry married a Swann and so did Gussie. I think that if there was anything it would be in the Swann family home. Wherever that is.” Skye had laid a false trail for Carl and Fergal to pick up and then she could prove them wrong.
“Actually, Carl, Skye may have a good point there,” said Fergal thoughtfully. “Henry married Mary Swann and then his son married Lucille Swann, so the Swann family home may, indeed, hold something of the secrets. It would be highly likely that whatever documents Gussie and Bertie may have had would have been kept with the Swanns’ papers.”
“And therefore highly unlikely to be here at The Lodge,” Carl concluded.
“I disagree completely,” Skye said firmly.
Carl and Fergal turned towards her, surprised at the confidence in her voice.
“I can’t tell you how exactly how they came to be here but I have found them here at The Lodge.” Skye spoke quietly, trying to keep the triumph out of her voice.
It was some time before Fergal realised what she had said. “You found them?”
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“Yes. In the attics that you were so reluctant to think might have any importance.”
“Are you going to let us in on the secret?” Carl asked, his irritation showing.
“I found three chests of documents and stuff,” she said defiantly. “One was Sir Gussie’s.”
“How do you know that?”
“It had his name on it.”
“Ah. That might give you sufficient clue.”
“And what was inside?” Fergal pressed, ignoring Carl’s sarcasm.
“This.”
Skye wasn’t yet ready to tell them all that she had found. She wanted them to pay for their condescending attitude towards her. So instead of telling them about the three chests she placed two sheets of paper on the table.
“Well?” Carl prompted.
“The dates are 1881 and 1882. Gussie started to look into his family history.”
“Show me.”
There were several minute of silence, broken only by the chimes of the hall clock, as Carl read the sheets she had given him.
“Let me summarise. His father, Sir Henry, sent him on a wild goose chase to York of all places but he found something there that led him to the Isle of Wight. He had never been told his father had a brother, let alone a twin, and he discovered that his Uncle William had been a renowned geologist but was dead. He was planning to go to the Isle of Wight but was sidetracked by going to South Africa. Interesting as all this is, it tells us nothing of any interest that we do not already know.” Carl put a dampener on what he saw as Skye’s unwarranted self-satisfaction.
“But it corroborates everything doesn’t it?” Skye pressed her point.
“Indeed, I have to admit it does.”
“Was there anything else in this box of Gussie’s?” Fergal asked. “Surely it didn’t just contain these notes?”
“Army stuff mostly,” she lied again. “Probably really useful to someone interested in the Zulu wars but nothing that could help us much.”
“Well that’s got us as far as Bertie.”
“I’ll see what I can find out about him tomorrow.” Fergal was annoyed that he hadn’t thought about investigating the links with the Swann family. Perhaps, he admitted to himself, Skye had a point that historians were blind when it came to younger sons and women.