“I do, sir, but if she has changed then I would, of course, respect her wishes.”
“She could do no better than you and you no better than her.”
“But first we have to get home.”
*
The ship stayed one week in Jamestown, St Helena and Gussie used the time to learn something of the island and of its most famous inhabitant.
He and Iain McFarlane, who was returning on the same ship, hired a local guide and on horseback they set out to enjoy the scenery and the history of the island.
They rode up to the Observatory set up on the site first used to observe the heavens by Edmund Halley in 1676. Gussie had expected a dome and a working telescope and was disappointed to find that Halley’s Mount was now home to the artillery and of no scientific importance.
They visited Old Longwood House where Napoleon Bonaparte had spent his last years but they spent only a little time there. The French had rebuilt the house and tried to make it a museum to their dead Emperor, but white ants were destroying it.
They had wanted to see where Napoleon had been buried before his body was returned to France in 1840 but their guide told him there was nothing to see in Sane Valley so instead they stopped at the Rose and Crown, a public house set on the junction of the road from Halley’s Mount to Longwood.
They sat at the bare table and as they drank Gussie talked of his month in York where he had been so happy. Then, even though he had had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, he had felt the decision would be his own. But, he told Iain, ever since he had sat down with his uncle and his mother’s family that evening when they had seen Cleopatra’s Needle erected on the Embankment, he had had no control over his life. Iain listened sympathetically. He was a few years older than Gussie but his background was different and where they had been equals in Cape Town he knew once they had returned to England they would mix in different circles. Gussie would join society and Iain would join his father in his legal practice.
Saying that he wanted some time to himself Gussie left Iain and walked down the small flight of steps into the street. He needed to think and the wild and beautiful scenery of the island suited his mood. He wondered whether Napoleon Bonaparte had walked these paths, and enjoyed these views of wild vegetation and weather-sculpted rocks, and whether his thoughts, too, had been confused.
When he had left for South Africa he truly believed that he could be happy with Lucille. But they had spent only a few days in each other’s company. How well did he know her, or she him? They had agreed to marry, and all their letters in the intervening years had contained references to the household and their future lives together, but, Gussie wondered, what would that mean? He had no need to find paid employment but he would need something to occupy his time. He did not see his future to be in the army and had already arranged to resign his honorary commission on their return to England.
He was twenty-four years old, he hoped he could be described as having some intelligence; he had sufficient money to maintain his family, when he had one, in a degree of comfort if not luxury. But he believed he had fifty years more left of his life and he had no idea what he was going to do in that time.
As he walked a steep zigzag path through the unfamiliar vegetation he made a mental list of the things he had enjoyed in his life and always came back to the weeks he had spent in York. He had found the library and the people he had met there likeable and unpretentious. He made his plans.
He would marry Lucille on his return to England, she would make him a comfortable home in South Audley Street, and they would have a brood of happy children. He would spend his days in the British Library, researching he knew not what, though he knew he would begin by reading the works of his Uncle William, the ‘explorer, writer, geologist’ he knew so little about.
*
Three days out from Jamestown General Swann had fallen ill and despite the best offices of the medical men on board had died as they approached Gibraltar.
The period of mourning he had not felt necessary for his wife was required and so it was a little over a year after his return from the Cape that Sir Augustus Lacey Bt. was married to Lucille Swann and the month of August 1882 was spent travelling Europe as newlyweds.
On their first morning in the South Audley Street house that was now their home Lucille was proud to show her husband how well she had learned the arts of household management by excusing herself after breakfast. “I must discuss various matters with Mrs Knight, she is the housekeeper,” she said with a mixture of pride and some self-importance. “Now your mother has moved to Berkshire I must put into practice all that I have learnt in these last two years.”
“I suspect she always intended returning to her childhood home at the first possible opportunity and she will know she has prepared you well for the task.” Gussie smiled indulgently.
“Now my mother and father are both gone…” She did not finish the sentence. Instead she smiled brightly and kissed her husband lightly on his forehead.
“I will see you this evening, husband.”
“I won’t be late. It seems an age since I was able to spend a day in the reading room at the British Museum, but it has only been the month of our tour.”
“I’m sure your friends will be delighted to welcome you back, Gussie, but are you certain you want to walk there? You hear such things about the streets these days.”
“You haven’t worried all this past year. I have often walked to Bloomsbury.”
“But then you were not my husband.”
Her mouth smiled but her eyes did not.
*
The character of London changed as he crossed Regent Street. Leaving behind the wide avenues and spacious houses of Mayfair he entered the network of narrow alleys of Soho. Turning left and right at the frequent junctions he headed north towards Oxford Street but before he reached that bustling thoroughfare he was joined by two fashionably dressed young men who settled to walk with him, one on either side, as they commented on the mildness of the day’s weather. Gussie was becoming uneasy when they did not leave him as he turned north into the quiet of Rathbone Place. He became alarmed as they eased him into Gresse Street and into an alley.
At no time was he afraid of death.
He had seen enough of it in the Cape to know it would be faced one day and he had assured himself that, once he knew it to be inevitable, he would face it bravely.
The small gun, barely larger than one of his assailant’s hands, was pressed to his neck as his pockets were rifled, his clothes stripped from his back.
He tried to reason with his assailants. “What advantage to killing me?” he asked them. “You have everything of mine worth stealing, what advantage to taking my life too?” But as he looked into their faces he knew they would kill him. If allowed to live he would report the crime and give a good description of his attackers. He knew then that they had done this before and would therefore hang anyway.
As Gussie’s eyes held those of the assailant he knew they would be the last things he would ever see.
*
Lucille, Lady Lacey sat quietly in the drawing room of the house in South Audley Street.
“I cannot live here.”
“No, dear, indeed you must not. You must return with me to Berkshire.”
“We must shut up the house.”
“It will be sold.”
“I must clear Gussie’s things. He didn’t have much but I need to keep what there is.”
“Leave that to me, my dear, I will have all his things taken to the country with us. There will be nothing you need worry about. McFarlane will deal with everything necessary.”
“McFarlane?”
“He is a man I know nothing of but who has been a friend to Gussie in the Cape and was named executor in dear Gussie’s will. He has been given responsibility over your finances, my dear. You are very lucky that Gussie was so thoughtful and considerate as to leave his affairs in such a tidy position.”
Lady
Lucille was not listening. She was, at that time, unconcerned with financial or legal arrangements. All her thoughts were of the life she had lost.
“They say he did not suffer, that the shot killed him instantly.”
“So they say.”
“But he would have known what was to befall him.”
“He would, my love.”
“He was so gentle, so kind, so…” Lady Lucille searched for the right word, “…so harmless. He would never have hurt anyone. Why would anyone wish to murder him?”
“The ruffians wouldn’t have cared what their victim was, how much he was loved, what good he would have done in the world.”
“They will be found? It is important that they are found and that they look me in the eye and tell me why they killed him.”
“It is unlikely. The police do what they can but these are lawless times.”
“So that is it? That is all I have of him?”
But that month in Europe was not all Lucille had of her husband.
Four weeks later Lucille felt the need to talk to her mother, who agreed with her. She was, indeed, expecting Gussie’s child.
*
In the years that followed Lady Lucille had every opportunity to investigate the attic stores of her country house outside the village of Yattendon in the county of Berkshire. Had she done so she would have found a sandalwood military chest with her husband’s name on the lid.
Had she opened the chest she would have found all the letters she had written to the man who was her husband for so short a time, and the ones he had copied before sending to her while he had been in the Cape.
She might also have seen, amongst his other papers, a letter tied with a fading pink ribbon to a small notebook with The Fifteenth day of July Nineteen Hundred and Fifteen written on its cover in an old-fashioned hand.
But Lady Lucille did not like to be reminded of Gussie so she never looked into the chest that contained so much and which gathered dust in the attic of the Swann ancestral home in Berkshire.
Chapter 11
Wednesday 5pm
“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.”
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