Look, it’s been a long day and we’re all pretty tired. Should we go down into the town for something to eat or should I cook another pizza and open another bottle of wine?” Skye did not see the look on Carl’s face as she waited for an answer.
Four days earlier, as he had sat on the ferry deck watching the Isle of Wight grow closer through the sea mist, he had been determined not to like Skye but her willingness to stick to her guns had impressed him and he had begun to accept that she might have something to offer in their search. She had been very useful to him as they had searched the library shelves and she fed him the hourly mug of coffee without which he could not function, but he had found her obsession with searching the attics wearing.
He suspected that her odd mood that evening was brought about by the fact that Fergal had been so successful in his research and she could not bring herself to admit that she had found nothing of use in her attics. He decided she was sulking and found it very unattractive.
“Pizza and wine will be fine. Won’t it Carl?” Fergal would rather spend more of the evening with Skye at The Lodge than with Carl in the hotel bar.
Carl watched Fergal watching Skye as she went about the kitchen gathering plates and cutlery, glasses and a bottle, and as she took a large pizza from the fridge and placed it in the oven.
Perhaps, Carl thought, there was more than just a competitive edge between the two and he allowed himself to think what might have happened if he had not been there to act as chaperone.
“Don’t you feel sorry for Bertie?” Skye asked as she sat back down at the table.
“Why?” Fergal replied when he saw that Carl was far from keen on Skye’s habit of hypothetical readings of character.
“Well, he died so young.”
“You think it was a waste?”
“Of course I do.”
“More of a waste than all the other young men and boys who joined up and died?” commented Carl sardonically.
“No. I’m not saying that. I just think it’s sad for him. He must have wanted to do more. It was in his genes to do more wasn’t it? I mean, his father and his great-uncle and his great-grandfather, they all did stuff.”
“Stuff?” Carl was scathing at Skye’s reliance on the word. To him it showed a disappointing lack of vocabulary.
“Fergal’s just said that Gussie at least did something in the Army, even though he was murdered when he was only twenty-five, and we know William travelled even if Henry didn’t go much further than London, and we suspect all sorts of things about the original Sir Bernard. Yet Bertie did nothing.”
“Perhaps it had skipped a generation, like it skipped his grandfather Henry,” suggested Fergal.
“It?” Carl queried.
“The get-up-and-go pioneering spirit I suppose,” Fergal explained. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it Skye?”
Skye nodded.
“It doesn’t necessarily follow that Bertie would feel the same need as previous generations to prove himself. He was, after all, born with every advantage family status, money and security could provide.” Carl, with great reluctance, found himself drawn into the speculative conversation.
“He missed so much though, didn’t he? He was the same generation as Uncle Henry who fought and was blinded in France and who lived through to the early 1970s.” Fergal took up Skye’s argument.
“I suspect that neither would have wanted the life of the other,” Carl said firmly.
“Can we get a picture of Bertie?” asked Skye.
“Why on earth would you want a picture? What on earth can that add to our knowledge?” Carl answered sharply.
“Well, I’m just interested, I mean he and Uncle Henry were cousins weren’t they?”
“Second cousins,” Fergal explained, “since they shared a great-grandfather. And you are Bertie’s second cousin twice removed.”
“Really? I never did understand all those removes.”
“It’s a generation thing, you’re two generations away from Henry, hence the twice removed.”
“Oh. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that Bertie and Uncle Henry’s lives seem so very different. I can’t help wondering what they would have made of each other had they ever met. And I was wondering whether, by some throwback of genes, they would have looked anything like each other. Not only were they second cousins but their grandfathers were twins.” Skye felt she had made her point well.
“I haven’t come across one but you never know.” Fergal smiled with what Skye thought might just be condescending indulgence.
“I’ve got loads of pictures of Uncle Henry.”
Skye wondered how much Carl and Fergal considered their investigations to be an exercise in academic research rather than the investigation into real people’s lives.
“Let’s get back to Bertie.” Carl resumed the discussion of facts. “Fergal, tell me what happened to the title when he died?” He knew the answer but he still wanted to lead the discussion by asking the question.
“He never married and so obviously had no immediate heir. When he died his executor, good old Iain McFarlane, had to go back a generation, to Bertie’s first cousin once removed.”
“So Claude’s grandson Bernard inherited the title.”
“Along with everything else.”
“And Bernard lived here didn’t he?” Skye said. “So the title came back to The Lodge.”
“It didn’t come back,” Fergal pointed out. “It had never been here.”
“Yes it had.” Skye shook her head. “The first Bernard’s son Henry lived here when he was Sir Henry didn’t he? When he was at school, until he went off to London?”
“Point taken. I’ll allow that one.”
“Allow? I’m right and you’re wrong, you can’t ‘allow me that one’.”
“Now, now children. Yes, Skye, you are absolutely right. The title came back here to The Lodge. How’s that pizza getting on?”
“It won’t be ready yet.”
“Now, Fergal, take a gulp of wine, imagine it’s humble pie, and tell us what you’ve found out about Sir Bernard the Second.”
“I’ve found out some bits. You know the chap from the island history group who was so helpful a couple of days ago? Well he said one of the reasons he had been particularly interested in the American’s request was that he had a family connection with the Laceys. He was quite chatty about it.” Fergal checked the notes he had written on his tablet. “Bernard Lacey was a weakling. That’s what this man said. His grandfather had been the local doctor.”
“Thank goodness for families where generations stay in the same place!” Carl smiled. “Where would historians be without them?” he asked rhetorically.
“Well, as I said the other evening, this American woman’s great-grandfather was Bernard Lacey but was obviously not legitimate. It made this chap look at births in the 1870s when Bernard would have been in his early twenties and there were a number where the father was unknown.”
“But that doesn’t mean it was Bernard who was responsible,” Carl interrupted, losing patience with the flimsiness of some of Fergal’s conclusions. “There would have been other men in the town. I can’t believe you’re taking any of this hearsay at face value, I thought better of you Fergal.”
“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence. Several of the girls involved had worked up at The Lodge.”
“That does, of course, tend to raise suspicions,” Carl admitted reluctantly.
“In fact, in the diaries of the vicar of the time there are several references to fathers asking him to do something about Bernard’s activities.”
Skye decided she would safely add something to their discussion.
“I read a staff register in one of the crates in the attic. I wondered about the number of maids discharged with the reason WC. Perhaps that meant With Child?”
“Entirely possible,” Carl said, but he did not want to dwell on maids. “Carry on Fergal.”
“Well, Bernard had been very ill as a young child with what was probably a form of meningitis or diphtheria. He was lucky to survive though he seems to have suffered some long term effects.”
“What do you mean ‘long term effects’? Are you saying he was mentally damaged?”
“I suppose I am saying he was not quite up to scratch. You know, ‘a sandwich short of a picnic’.”
“Come on Fergal, call a spade a spade. In his time he would have been called feeble-minded.”
“Whatever he was called it seems he also developed into what would today be called an aggressive sexual predator. Bernard was a weakling and as with many weaklings he turned out to be something of a bully.”
“How do we know that? Don’t answer that, I suppose it was this man’s grandfather, the doctor?”
Fergal nodded.
“Don’t you think it’s rather sad if William and Josephine’s son turned out to be a bit of a shit? I mean we like William and Josephine, don’t we?” Skye asked.
“Don’t be unfair to the man. If he had been ill as a child his behaviour and personality might well not have been his fault.”
“But what we do know is that horrid Bernard married an equally horrid woman from Wales who was bossy and arrogant and treated everyone else, including one of her sons, like dirt.”
“How can we possibly know that?” Carl was incredulous.
“Because Audrey told me and her Uncle Henry, who was Bernard’s son and was the one treated like dirt, will have told her.”
“Do we actually have any facts Fergal?” Carl prompted, turning away from Skye, unable to argue his point in the face of her family knowledge.
“Bernard Lacey, not a baronet at that time and simply described as ‘gentleman’, married Catherine de Burgh in 1887. He was thirty-five years old and she was described as ‘spinster’ even though she was also well into her thirties. Her father was Llewellyn Hughes, described as ‘mine owner, farmer, banker’ so he was definitely ‘trade’.”
“Where did the ‘de Burgh’ come from then, if her father was Hughes?” Skye asked, genuinely interested since this was something she had not known.
“Probably to give his businesses some extra clout,” replied Carl dismissively. “Many new money families changed their names, or double-barrelled them, to make them sound more substantial.”
“But she was Welsh?”
“Oh, she was definitely Welsh.”
“Audrey said it was definitely not what could be called a ‘love match’. She said Bernard and Catherine hated each other and spent as little time together as possible.”
“Well that’s borne out by the records.” Fergal looked meaningfully at Carl. “Bernard wasn’t even here at The Lodge when his sons were born. On both the birth certificates his residence is given as Monmouth.”
“Sons?” Carl prompted.
“William Bernard Llewellyn, the elder, born in 1888 and Henry Oliver Llewellyn, born in 1890.”
“At least they stuck to the same old family names. I was lucky I wasn’t called Bernadette Henrietta Wilhelmina.” Skye tried a smile which Fergal returned.
“I wonder if this William was anything like his grandfather William.”
“Perhaps Henry might have been, if the war hadn’t got in the way.”
“Wars have a habit of getting in the way of many things.”
“Time for pizza I think,” Fergal said after several moments of heavy silence.
Carl was interested to see that it was Fergal, not Skye, who fetched the pizza from the oven and cut it into pieces.
“Thanks,” Skye said as Fergal poured the wine and placed a glass in front of her. “I was beginning to think I was just the housekeeper here.”
Fergal decided he would do more to help Skye as Carl picked up a piece of pizza and started to lecture them.
“You must never forget that you can know nothing of who these people really were. We may have all the facts of their births and their marriages, the dates of their children’s births and marriages, we may even have letters and documents and anecdotes handed down from grandparents but we cannot know them. Skye, you have a very annoying habit of putting your thoughts and feelings into the circumstances of others and it will not do. We understand very little of the people who we know in the present, how impossibly arrogant we are to imagine we can understand those whose existence we only know through the finding of random facts.”
“But we can try to understand can’t we?” Skye pressed her case. “We can try to put ourselves in their places and try to understand their motives? Can’t we? I would have thought that was what history was about.”
“No. We can’t and it isn’t.” Carl’s voice was firm as he repeated, “No, that is one thing we most definitely cannot do, nor should we attempt to. Our whole life experience prohibits that. We cannot ever put ourselves in their place, if only because we know what happens in their futures. We know things they did not, so we cannot understand them.”
“You mean we can’t imagine what it was like to live in 1913 because we know what happened in 1914?”
“Exactly that.”
“Don’t you find that rather sad?” Skye asked, thinking that, perhaps, she was winning a part of her battle. “I do.”
Carl frowned, then smiled. “Any chance of a coffee? Fergal? I gather it’s time you took your turn with the kettle.”