Big farming
JANE FOUND THAT Lol had been right. There was nothing online about the Kilpeck Morris and very little about Sir Lionel Darvill.
However…
What he should have done was followed the family name. Jane – grimly driven tonight – did some serious following on the laptop up in her apartment with Ethel sleeping on her bed and the old blow-heater death-rattling behind her. Whoever these guys were, she was coming for them.
The Darvills of Kilpeck.
You didn’t have to be particularly famous to get a Wikipedia entry and there was quite a lot on the Darvills. The name had been spelled a few different ways over the centuries, notably De Ville, as in Cruella, for quite a while until it found its current form in the nineteenth century.
Well, of course, Jane knew that the British aristocracy had grown out of thieving and backhanders, favours to the Crown getting repaid. What changed?
The Darvills claimed their ancestors had come over with William the Conqueror or maybe a little later. These posh bastards were always lying about their roots. Whether this particular branch was descended from the original Norman family was open to conjecture, but they were certainly baronets, which gave them a title they could pass on but no seat in the House of Lords. Seemed like win-win to Jane.
She had to wade through two world wars and a lot of politics before finding something shining dully out of the dirt.
The key period began with Peter Darvill, who had inherited the title in the late 1960s along with a big farmhouse, rather than a mansion, called Maryfields, in the middle of a substantial estate just outside Kilpeck. Peter had become an active farmer, running the expanding estate for nearly ten years, very profitably, until he died, suddenly, the way a lot of active farmers died.
You didn’t have to live in the sticks for very long to learn that, even today, a high proportion of accidental deaths on farms were down to tractor accidents. Peter Darvill had had this huge, expensive beast, a pedigree shirehorse of a tractor, a power symbol. He’d climbed down from the cab when it was on a hillside and gone round the back, apparently to check on something, somehow failing to immobilize it, and the great tractor had come rolling inexorably back, on its enormous tyres, over Sir Peter.
He was divorced, no kids, so the title went to his younger brother, Henry, which was where it got interesting. This was because Henry had no particular interest in agriculture, according to Wikipedia, while being fascinated by stuff that Jane could well understand people getting into: basically, human potential. Not how much money he could make but what he could be. What any of us could be.
Henry Darvill was a mystic with intent.
Jane – and his destiny, as it turned out – found him at an establishment called the College for Perpetual Learning, which he’d helped finance with much of his inheritance as second son when Peter had landed the farm.
The college had been founded in a small mansion near Pershore in neighbouring Worcestershire, to continue the work of the late George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
OK, she was sure she’d heard the name, but nobody could be expected to know every eastern-European-bordering-on-Russian spiritual teacher.
She liked the look of him at once: bald head, big black curly moustache and eyes that nailed you to the wall even in old black and white photos. Gurdjieff, dead since 1949, had spent years guru-chasing in North Africa and the East, before coming west between the world wars, settling in France, collecting a bunch of wealthy and cultured followers whom he’d tasked with menial work like toilet cleaning in the cause of attaining higher consciousness. He called it the Fourth Way because it was achievable in the course of an ordinary life. Gurdjieff’s premise: you’re all asleep, you need to learn how to awaken fully or you’re stuffed in the afterlife. But don’t think it’s going to be easy.
Whether Henry Darvill ever fully awoke was debatable because he had to give up his studies at the College for Perpetual Learning to become Sir Henry.
After which the Maryfields estate would never be the same again.
Merrily was huddled into a corner of Lol’s sofa, one sleeve of the cashmere sweater pushed up, he guessed, to hide a new hole, one hand gripping the other as if it might come away. Her shoes were off, her hair was loose. She looked younger, but not necessarily in a good way. As if she was throwing off all resemblance to an adult in control.
He’d turned the hard chair away from the desk to face her. The stove was burning low.
‘I’m not going all self-pitying and using words like betrayed,’ Merrily said, not looking at him, ‘but I did think I could trust you. Of all people.’
‘What could I do?’ Lol’s eyes shutting in anguish. ‘He’d already started. I tried to talk him out of it. If I hadn’t helped him he might’ve been there all night. I like Gomer.’
‘We all like Gomer. Jesus Christ, we love Gomer…’
‘He just had to know he was right. At his time of life, these things are important.’
‘Lol, it’s not what you did, abhorrent though it was. It’s the fact that you conspired—’
‘Conspired? Fucking hell…’
‘Decided to hide it from me. You dug up the grave of a man in my churchyard and you thought it would not be good to tell me in case it offended my… Christian sensibilities?’
‘What would you have done… if you’d known?’
‘I don’t know. Something. I don’t know. It changes everything, doesn’t it? This really is a crime. And you…’
‘Yeah, I’m guilty, too. Just as guilty as whoever did it the first time.’
‘And Jane—’
‘Jane had no part in it.’
‘Except to incite you to go ahead. While I… slept.’
Lol sat staring between his knees to the stone flags.
‘We were wrong. I was wrong. I should’ve told you this morning. Should’ve been waiting for you outside the church door…’
‘We can’t go to the police now, can we? We can’t even go to the police we know. We’re in the middle of it now. We’re part of it.’
‘You aren’t—’
‘Don’t you— You promise me now that you will never again—’
‘Merrily, please—’
She looked about to cry. Put both hands over her face, and stifled it. Sat upright on the edge of the sofa.
‘I’m sorry. You were there only because of us. Because of something Jane said. If you hadn’t been there, Jane would still have turned up. Then God knows what would’ve happened. Jane and Gomer. A lethal cocktail. I’m sorry. It’s time for me to do something. And don’t… don’t ask me what.’
The first thing Henry Darvill did when he took over Maryfields was get rid of the big tractor that killed his older brother.
Probably not realizing at the time how symbolic this would be. It would, according to Wikipedia, condition his whole future approach to farming.
Big tractor: big agriculture.
Bad.
Well, yeah, big agriculture was bad. Jane thought of old woodland getting chainsawed into oblivion, hedgerows ripped up, ancient field-systems lost for ever, wildlife habitats destroyed. She’d read that over a hundred species of wildlife were facing extinction in the UK because of pesticides sterilizing the countryside. Manure replaced by chemicals. You saw these massive crop-spraying machines too wide for the border lanes, all shiny metal discs and poisonous tubes coiled together. Meeting one was like facing some horror-comic alien invasion. Even before it had pushed you into the ditch, you hated it.
So the death of his brother had brought about this Damascene conversion in Henry Darvill. OK, maybe not Damascene – Wikipedia said it had happened over a period of two or three years; you couldn’t immediately become an organic farmer, you had to ease the land back into the old ways. And you had to be prepared to lose money.
So, at first, profits sank, and Sir Henry didn’t seem get along with some of his neighbours for reasons that were not clear but probably included stuff like reopening the old footpath between Maryfields and Kilpeck Church.
But Henry, in comparative penury, was on a high. At last he could live with himself as a big landowner with a title.
Though not with his farm manager. Jane read that the second big thing Henry did, which took much longer than getting rid of the tractor, was to dispense with the services of the very efficient, very professional guy who had made a lot of money for his brother Peter on the basis that Big Farming was the only kind that worked.
There were no details of this on Wikipedia, and it probably didn’t matter, but Jane never liked to give up until she had everything the Net had to reveal. Besides, she hadn’t yet found anything about Sir Lionel who, presumably, was Sir Henry’s successor.
She found the crunch line eventually on a dense site dealing with industrial tribunals involving farm workers. It seemed the Maryfields farm manager’s unfair dismissal case had been abandoned after he was bought off, at considerable expense.
Enough, it was suggested, to enable the farm manager to acquire a farm of his own on the edge of a village about twenty miles away.
Holy shit.
Jane stood up, images of oilseed rape soaking into her thoughts like yellow vomit.