“I am sure that your prayers helped me. The Bank Manager and I have reached the conclusion that it is quite impossible for the money, and it is indeed a large sum, to have been hidden anywhere but in this house.”
“Here!” Benina exclaimed. “But where could the Marquis have concealed it?”
“That is what you and I have to find out. Although he was mad, he was very clever, as mad people often are, and it is not going to be easy.”
“We must start looking at once, my Lord, otherwise there may not be anything for us to eat!”
David smiled.
“It is not as bad as that. I have arranged to have an overdraft. It’s not a very large one, but we must at first be grateful for small mercies.”
“I shall be grateful for anything as long as we don’t have to be as hungry as we have been this last few months. It was terrible when Nanny began to feel ill and I thought I might be left entirely alone here.”
“Nanny can now eat until she is as fat as she ought to be,” said David, “and the same applies to you. You are far too thin and I have often been told that thin women are querulous and disagreeable!”
He was teasing, but Benina answered indignantly,
“I am none of those things.”
“I know,” smiled David, “but it is something I don’t want you to become.”
“Then let’s start looking right away!”
“I think we would feel better if we had luncheon first and I am certain that Nanny would be most annoyed if we let it get cold.”
“You are quite right, my Lord, shall I go to the kitchen and tell her what you have told me?”
“Yes, of course, Benina, we are all in this adventure and if we fail, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.”
“We are not going to fail,” insisted Benina.
“Well, before we start our search, I intend to find a key to the cellar or break down the door!”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you, my Lord. How stupid of me! I was so excited to see you back that I forgot.”
“What did you forget?”
“I found the key! It was hidden in a drawer in what is now your bedroom. Your grandfather put it right at the back behind a Bible and some old letters. I am sure that no one would have thought to look in there.”
“Well done, Benina! If you have the key, let’s go and explore the cellar. Perhaps we might find some wine down there.”
He thought as he spoke that considering how mean his grandfather had been, it was most unlikely that there would be any at all.
However, to his joy there were a number of bottles of claret, brandy and wine that had been home-brewed.
The cellar was cavernous and with the lantern that Benina carried, it was easy to see that it was practically empty.
There was nothing likely to be hidden in the bare walls or below the stony ground.
‘After all,’ David thought, ‘we are not looking for a few coins, but for a large amount of golden guineas.’
They could not be just shoved away in a corner.
When they emerged from the cellar, they found that Nanny was dishing up their luncheon.
“You’re going to enjoy all this, my Lord,” she said, “and so’ll Miss Benina. I’m feeling more like myself than I’ve felt for many a month.”
“I have obtained some more money for you, Nanny, as soon as you need it, but there is one thing I want to do before we start chasing round the house and that is to get in touch with Newman.”
“Oh, he’s in the workhouse, my Lord.”
“Yes, I know, Nanny, but is he in fairly good health and capable of coming back to help us?”
Nanny looked at David in surprise.
“That the best thing you’ve ever said, my Lord. If there’s one person who knows every inch of the house, it’s Mr. Newman and I knows that nothing’d please him more than being back here in what he has always considered his own home.”
“As we are rather busy, Nanny, can you please get the gardener’s son to go and tell him I am here and ask him when it will be convenient to pick him up.”
“He will be thrilled!” exclaimed Benina.
“There must be someone in the village, who would be willing to drive him here if I pay him.”
“I’ll arrange it, my Lord,” Nanny offered, “and I do knows that Mr. Newman’ll be here as quick as he can, if he has to fly to do so!”
She picked up the roast lamb she had on a tray and carried it ahead of them into the study.
David found that Benina had laid the table they had used last night and when Nanny put down the lamb, all he had to do was to carve.
There were vegetables to go with it which he knew must have come from the garden, and David suspected that the gardener or his son were only too willing to help if they could be paid a few pennies for doing so.
David thought he must see the gardener and arrange for him to go to work on the garden again.
Yet he thought it would please Newman to be the first to be back working again at Ingle Hall.
He and Benina both enjoyed their luncheon and the bread-and-butter pudding Nanny had made for them with a little cream from the village was simply delicious.
“Have you had enough to eat, my Lord?” Benina asked when they had finished. “I expect Nanny forgot that you might like some cheese and biscuits.”
“I have had plenty, Benina, and like you I want to get on with our task of searching the house. What I think is important now is to find all the keys. You have told me the safe was locked – ”
“I will go and collect all the keys I can find.”
“I will come with you, Benina, because I think we must do this in a systematic manner, starting at the bottom and working up until we reach the attics. If we cannot find the money, at least we will know what is in the house.”
David paused for a moment and then he enquired,
“Is there an inventory of the contents anywhere?”
“Yes, it’s in the library and I think, although I may be wrong, that your grandfather compiled it, hoping to find something he could sell and add to his pile of money.”
David thought that this was unlikely, as he was quite certain that his deranged grandfather was obsessed by the idea that everything Ingle Hall contained was his.
And he would resent anything, however small and unimportant, being stolen, mislaid or sold.
He might be wrong and yet if the old man had been so possessive to the point of hoarding all his money in his own hands, he would not have been willing to sell anything illegally.
It was, however, what David himself was prepared to do if he thought he could get away with it, but he knew the fuss there would be if anyone tried to evade the very strict laws of entailment.
Yet, if there was anything that had been overlooked, he thought he would be absolutely justified in selling it to bring the land back into cultivation and restore the house to its former glory.
He and Benina set off as he had suggested.
Having investigated the wine cellar, they searched the other cellars and there was nothing except rubbish and an accumulation of dust and dirt from old age.
There was one cellar full of empty old boxes and trunks that had obviously been put there when the servants were too lazy to carry them up to the attics.
Their hands became filthy from handling them, but there was nothing to be found, not even old documents that might have been valuable.
He looked through the long inventory that Benina had managed to find of all the contents of the house, but he was not hopeful of finding anything that could be sold.
The exploration of the cellars took them the whole of the afternoon and into the evening.
When they came upstairs, Nanny made them wash their hands in the kitchen before, as she insisted, they went into the ‘gentry’ part of the house.
As they did so, David thought that he could hear someone arriving.
“I am sure there is a carriage outside,” he remarked.
“I expect it be the visitor you’re expecting.”
“Newman!”
He hurried from the kitchen into the front hall, but Benina beat him to the front door.
She opened it in time to see Newman stepping out of a farmer’s cart.
He was looking, David thought, as he reached him, a great deal older with his white hair, but he was smiling broadly and was very obviously delighted to be back.
“I just didn’t believe my old ears, Mr. David, when they tells me you had come home and wanted me.”
“I want you very much, Newman, and I am so glad you are well enough to come.”
“Well enough! There’ll be nothing wrong with me and I can see there’s a great deal wrong with the house, but take it from me, his late Lordship, mad or not, was clever enough as a cartload of monkeys.”
“He was lucky to get away with it all,” commented David. “I would have thought that there would have been someone to stop him.”
“If you would ask me, he was able to save himself by sacking everyone in the house and forcing Miss Benina and Nanny to do all the work.”
“You may be right, Newman, but he must have put the money somewhere and we have to find it.”
“And we’ll find it, my Lord, but I’m not pretending to you or anyone else it’s going to be easy.”
When David retired to bed, he thought that this was true, yet somehow he felt rather more optimistic than he had felt before, now that Newman was back.
Of course, he told himself, he could bring in trained detectives to find what they were seeking, but that would be to make their problem public – sooner or later someone would be bound to talk.
He was certain, if that did happen, it would evoke a great deal of sympathy, curiosity and greed.
The prize was two million pounds so who would not be anxious to help in the search?
The more he thought about his situation, the more he was convinced that everything must be kept secret.
Newman, Nanny and Benina, having been sworn to remain silent, the rest of the world would not be interested – they would think he was only trying to repair the damage wrought by neglect.
They would have no idea there were other reasons for their rampaging through the many rooms of Ingle Hall.
Already David was aware of the enormous amount of servants he would ultimately require to clean up the dirt and dust in every room.
He would need many expert craftsmen to repair the ceilings that had fallen down and put in new windowpanes.
But what was much more important than anything else was to find the money.
As once again he went to bed in the four-poster in which his ancestors had slept, he sent up a little prayer to his father and mother as he felt that they more than anyone else would appreciate the enormous task in front of him.
A task that was essential not only for him, but for the generations of his family to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
David came in late for breakfast and Benina looked at him questioningly.
Newman had already opened up the breakfast room and swept away most of the dust. It was a pretty room with long windows overlooking the garden and as it faced East, it received the first rays of the sun.
He had arranged their breakfast in the way it always had been in what he spoke of as ‘the good old days’.
“I am sorry I am late,” said David, as he entered.
“I wondered what had happened to you, my Lord,” remarked Benina.
“I went to see Cosnet to tell him that he was to take over the garden.”
Cosnet was the man he had been told had hidden himself away so that he could keep his cottage and his son had secretly helped Nanny and looked after the horses.
“What I have arranged,” declared David serving himself eggs and bacon, “is that Cosnet will do what he can in the garden until I find him some more help. Ben, his son, will groom the horses and run messages.”
Benina laughed.
“He will be kept busy.”
“I thought you would say that, Benina, as I just sent him on one that will meet with your approval.”
“What can that be?”
“I have told him to instruct the butcher to give the pensioners sufficient meat and sausages for three days and then to repeat the order until I tell him to stop.”
Benina clapped her hands together.
“Oh, my Lord, only you could have done anything so wonderful. They will be so thrilled.”
“I only hope they will be and I have also told Ben to tell the grocer to give them bread, butter and cheese. At least they will not starve.”
For a moment Benina could not speak and then she exclaimed,
“I did not think anyone with your name could be so marvellous!”
“It is what I will have to be in the future, whether I like it or not. I just cannot have the Marquis of Inglestone going down in posterity as an evil monster!”
“That is just what I think your grandfather was.”
“Now, what we must convene, as soon as we have finished breakfast, is a Council of War. So please will you tell Newman and Nanny to come to the study and you and I will be waiting for them there.”
Benina gave a little laugh.
“Everything is becoming more and more exciting. I was beginning to think I was living in a backwater where nothing ever happened, except that Nanny and I grew older every minute.”
“Now you have to be young again! And I think you are already making a good job of it.”
David looked at her as he spoke.
With the sun shining through the windows onto her golden hair, she looked ethereally lovely.
At the same time he was aware that her blue dress was the same one she had worn the day before and the day before that – it was patched and darned in several places.
However, he told himself it was too soon to worry about clothes as, if their next exploration was as dirty as it had been yesterday, it was clearly no use wearing anything decent.
David finished his second cup of coffee, and then set off to the study.
He sat down, as his grandfather had, at the beautiful Regency writing desk and he could not help thinking that the desk and its gold inkpot would bring in a considerable amount if sold to a collector in London.
Then he told himself firmly it was not his to sell, as it was entailed for future generations, but perhaps in their explorations in the next few days, they would find something not on the inventory.
Nanny and Newman entered the study and Nanny piped up,
“Now you’re not to keep us for too long, my Lord, if you want a good luncheon. I’ve got a chicken to pluck and that takes time!”
David smiled at her.
“I will not keep you long, Nanny. It’s just that I want us four to know what we are doing and not waste any unnecessary time about it.”
“If you’re talking about a-finding all that money, it can’t be found quick enough for my liking.”
“I am doing my best, Nanny.”
“Of course, he is,” said Benina almost indignantly. “No one could have worked any harder than he and I did yesterday.”
“And a nice mess you made of yourselves!”
David held up his hand.
“Now listen to me, all of you. First and foremost, everything we say in this room is a secret and known only to ourselves. We must be careful of unwary words, or talking too loudly, so that the outside world does not find out what we are doing.”
He thought as he spoke of the dangers he had faced in India and how a whispered word out of place in The Great Game could so easily end in the death of one of its members.
“We will be very careful,” Benina agreed softly.
“Now what we have to do is to search everywhere, but not to waste time by going to the most unlikely places.”
“That’s good common sense,” remarked Nanny.
“What I want to ask you, Newman, is if you have any id
eas where my grandfather might have concealed the money he brought back from the Bank?”
“I well remembers his Lordship going to the Bank,” replied Newman, “on the first of every month, but I’d no idea what he was going for, although I hoped it were for funds to pay our wages.”
“When he came back, what did he do?”
“That’s difficult for me to answer, my Lord. Usually he went in the morning and came back before luncheon. I would be in the dining room getting things ready.”
He saw that David looked disappointed and added quickly,
“There were footmen in the hall until his Lordship sacked them, but we can’t get in touch with them now.”
“Of course not and even if we did, we would have to explain why we are so interested in what my grandfather was carrying.”
Newman put his fingers up to his forehead.
“Now I thinks about it,” he said, “I’ve an idea that I seen him once going up the stairs with a parcel in his arms. I can’t be certain what sort of parcel it were. I just thinks as how he’s going up to his bedroom and I expects I says to him, ‘luncheon’ll be ready in five minutes, my Lord’.”
David was listening intently.
“That does sound as if what he brought back from the Bank might be on the first floor.”
“It seems sensible for him to hide it in his bedroom or somewhere close by,” suggested Benina.
“That’s right,” Nanny agreed. “If he was worrying about his precious money, he’d not want it to be out of his reach.”
“Very well, that’s just what I wanted to know. Now Miss Benina and I will start searching the first floor and when Newman has time, he can look at some of the rooms on the ground floor. This is going to take time.”
“Of course it is,” came in Benina, “and I expect you realise that there is not only this room on the ground floor.”
She started to count on her fingers.
“There is the drawing room, the dining room, the ballroom, the refreshment room next to it, the music room, the Chapel and the library not to mention the tapestry room and the room where we have just had breakfast!”
David held up his hands.
“Now you are scaring me, but we will manage them all in time. I am only trying to speed up what we have to do so we don’t waste any time searching somewhere like the ballroom where I am certain no one would want to hide anything.”
Hide and Seek for Love Page 8