Darcy nodded. “None at all. You are absolutely right, my love, but I am afraid Julian seems convinced there is something more to William’s strange behaviour than meets the eye.”
“Does he? In what way?” asked Kate.
Darcy was noncommittal. “I doubt that even he knows; he simply feels there is something about William’s behaviour that is not right. I believe it is just a suspicion; he has suggested that I should make some enquiries when we are in London.”
Kate was outraged. “What? Darcy, you cannot agree to that! Not if you intend that we should accept William’s invitation, which you have as good as done. It would be the most duplicitous thing to do, and I certainly would not advise you to do it. Indeed, I should not feel comfortable accepting any invitation from William, under such circumstances,” she said firmly.
Darcy knew she was right. He was deeply troubled himself and wished he had said nothing to Julian about his conversation with William. It had complicated the situation, and now, if his wife were to insist that they decline the invitation, it would make matters worse. It was likely that William Courtney would conclude that Darcy and Kate had been influenced by his grandparents and the rest of the Pemberley clan not to accept his hospitality. Yet, to do so while following Julian’s suggestion that he should make some investigation of William’s conduct was unthinkable. It was a false position that he, on reflection, found quite abhorrent.
When he spoke, after a few moments, thought, his voice was grave. “You are quite right, my love, it would not be possible for me to do as Julian asks while accepting William’s invitation. It would place me, both of us, in a most invidious position and could likely cause a great deal of damage within the family if William were ever to discover the truth. I shall tell Julian so tomorrow. I am sorry if he thinks I have squibbed it—I did originally agree—but that was before I had met and spoken with William and accepted his kind invitation. I’m afraid I shall just have to tell Julian I cannot do it.”
Kate was thoughtful. “Do you have to? Is it not possible to say nothing now? Avoid discussing the matter until we are back from London, when you could say to Julian that you noticed nothing untoward at all. At least that way you will not lay yourself open to an accusation of hypocrisy. Darcy, I am wary of these private investigations into people’s lives, they are high-handed and intrusive and can often cause trouble between the parties concerned,” she said, adding in a more confidential tone, “As you well know, dearest, I have myself been a victim of the kind of intrusion that often allows malice and misunderstanding to be used to destroy a person’s happiness or indeed their very character. Were William ever to discover that you were involved in such an enterprise, and we have no evidence that he is engaged in anything that warrants such an investigation, we should be badly compromised and probably lose his friendship and respect forever.”
And her husband knew that every word she spoke was sound common sense. It was one of the qualities he most admired in her. Agreeing that she was right and it was best not to say anything more about the matter to Julian, he declared that he would make no further mention of it to anyone.
Kate, never inclined to push her husband too far, smiled and said, “I think that would be very wise, dearest. I do not believe that it would be fair either to you or to William for you to undertake such a mission. I am quite sure, too, that Mr and Mrs Darcy, if they knew of Julian’s suggestion, would not be comfortable with the proposition. It would not be considered proper and would place you in a most unhappy position. I think you are quite right in deciding not to proceed with it.”
Her husband, delighted with his wife’s approval, relaxed and held out a hand to her. “Thank you, my dearest Kate; what should I do without your excellent understanding and judgment? I am sure I should be quite at sea. I confess I have been troubled by the matter and wondered how I should deal with the situation. At least, we can now make arrangements for our visit to London and our meeting with William with a clear conscience,” he said. To which she replied with a bright smile, “And we can enjoy every minute of it.”
Chapter Six
The arrival in the district of a Mr Wilson Croker went almost unnoticed at the time, probably because it coincided with the celebrations following upon the victory of the Camden and Pemberley cricket team over their traditional rivals from Ripley.
It is quite likely that Teresa Courtney was one of a few people who had seen the stranger drive up the road in a smart little vehicle, alight at the boundary of Oakleigh manor, and survey the surrounding countryside. With little interest in the cricket, she had remained at the farm, intent on getting on with the task of preserving fruit, while Jude and some of the young men had gone down into the village to watch the match.
Carefully preparing a basket to gather the ripe fruit, Teresa had gone out to the orchard, when a man she had never seen before had alighted from his gig some distance from the farm gate, which opened onto the lane that formed one of the boundaries of the property. She had observed him at first without much interest, as he strode along the laneway for a fair distance, with a notebook in hand, stopping from time to time to write in it.
For all she knew he could have been an itinerant artist or a man from the council—neither interested Teresa at all. She was more concerned about ensuring that the plums she was intending to preserve were unbruised as she gathered them into her basket, sampling them for sweetness and wiping her hands on her apron.
The man, who had clearly seen her when he first arrived, returned after some time and barely threw a second glance in her direction before getting back in his vehicle and driving away.
Getting on with her work, Teresa soon forgot about him, but she did remember to mention his appearance to her husband when he returned home in time for dinner. Flushed with the success of the home team and keen to sample the contents of the jars on the kitchen table, Jude Courtney greeted his wife with more than the usual affection and seemed at first disinterested in the stranger, but when she described the man and his vehicle, he began to pay more attention.
“He was very smartly dressed, that is all I could see from where I stood in the orchard, and he had a very stylish hat that must surely have been made in London. He saw me but did not even trouble to tip his hat; I was picking plums, and he probably took me for a servant,” she said, laughing, which caused her husband to look across the table at her and say, “If that is the case, he cannot have been from the district. Everyone around here knows you and your grandfather. He must have been from Derby or Birmingham. I wonder who he could have been and what he was doing up here. Who could possibly be interested in this part of the country?”
Having thought for a moment, he asked, “What did he look like?”
Teresa laughed again. “I did tell you, my dear, I did not see his face clearly, but he was fashionably dressed; he had a notebook in his hand and was writing in it; it seemed as though he was looking at the farm and the land around it. He walked all the way up the hill towards the woods and back again,” she said.
Jude was somewhat disturbed, but unable to put his concerns about the presence of a stranger in the area into words. He was aware that on previous occasions agents from the big towns and even as far afield as London had made approaches to his late grandmother and even more recently to his mother, wanting to bid on the property, offering them considerable sums of money for the holdings.
Oakleigh Manor with its salubrious surroundings, its fertile farmlands, pastures, woods, and trout stream was, despite its moderate size, clearly a valuable asset. Since their marriage, Teresa had worked hard to get the house scrubbed, cleaned, and tidy, while Mr Mancini had spent many hours restoring the grounds and fences around it. Both of them took great pride in their work and soon had the old place looking like it had been before, a desirable if modest estate. With Mr Mancini’s help, Jude hoped to get the home farm production up again to where it would support the family. There was of course the problem of capital. Following his mother’s death, not a l
ot of it remained and some would have to be found to get the farm working again.
“Are you quite sure it was not one of your grandfather’s friends come to look over the flower farm?” he asked, and this time Teresa put down her spoon and took her preserving pan off the stove before answering, “Surely, my dear, I should recognise my grandfather’s friends. I have known most of them all my life, and if it was one of them, they would have spoken with me. No, this man was not anyone we know, believe me; he was a total stranger, and yet he seemed very interested in our farm.”
Not being of a generally suspicious nature, Jude Courtney did not appear too deeply troubled but was, nevertheless, sufficiently concerned to make a mental note to draw the attention of his cousin Darcy Gardiner to the matter of the stranger, when he saw him at church on Sunday.
Thereafter, he turned his attention to his wife for whom his feelings grew stronger every day. With both his parents being continually busy with work in the parish, Jude had grown up with his sister Jessica for company; since she had left home to live at Pemberley and teach at the parish school, he had missed the consistent care and affection she had shown him as a boy. Following their marriage, his wife Teresa had brought warmth and affection back into his life, and he returned it in full measure.
* * *
Darcy Gardiner, in the midst of being congratulated by all and sundry on the victory of his cricket team, was rather surprised at the seriousness with which his young cousin approached him after church on Sunday. Although his tale of a well-dressed stranger surveying the land around Oakleigh and taking notes on the previous afternoon, while most of the village was at the cricket match, did sound extraordinary, Darcy wondered if Jude wasn’t jumping at shadows. But his wife Kate, listening to Teresa’s story, was prepared to take it much more seriously than her husband. Her Irish antecedents made her rather suspicious of strangers, particularly well-heeled ones, looking over her land and, she declared, anyone whose interest was benign would not have missed the opportunity to talk to one of the local people. That the man in a stylish hat had apparently ignored Teresa, while looking over Oakleigh and its environs, Kate found deeply disturbing.
“Darcy, I do believe you should make enquiries in the village about this man. A stranger of such a description cannot have passed through unnoticed; he must have hired the vehicle or rented a room or eaten a meal somewhere. Someone will know his name or his business,” she said with such certitude that Darcy had to take her concerns seriously.
Promising Jude that he would make discreet enquiries, Darcy tried to reassure Teresa and urged her to remain observant in case the stranger returned to the area.
“You are quite right to have been concerned. With the parlous state of agriculture in England, there have been several reports of agents from Birmingham and Manchester moving into these parts looking to purchase likely properties, but I would not have thought that they would be interested in a place such as Oakleigh Manor. It is quite clearly a working farm requiring too much hard work for their clientele, who are mainly the recently rich looking to acquire a country estate to improve their social standing,” he said.
“If that were all, I should simply tell them that Oakleigh is not for sale,” said Jude, shrugging his shoulders, but Teresa was not quite so easily reassured and welcomed Darcy’s pledge that he would discover the identity and motives of the stranger in their midst.
“I am not happy that this man should be wandering around our farm, without a word to us to say what his business is,” she complained.
Kate, too, was uneasy, and while she urged her husband to make enquiries in the village, she was determined to do likewise. The two couples parted, and while Kate urged Teresa to be vigilant at all times, Darcy, sensing her unease, promised to return with more information as soon as he could find it. He did not expect it to be very difficult—if this stranger was as conspicuously dressed as Teresa had described, then someone in the village must remember the man.
Unhappily, he was to be proved quite wrong.
Despite making many and varied enquiries in and around the village and even as far as Kympton and Pemberley, he could find no one who could remember the man he described. When he mentioned it to his parents, Cassandra and Richard both reminded him that there had been reports of brokers from London looking for land for developers, who planned to build new mansions in the countryside to satisfy the demands of those whose newly acquired wealth had not bought them the genteel status they craved.
“Stranded outside the circle of society they would like to enter, they are trying to buy their way in by acquiring some of the trappings of the country gentleman’s way of life. The very first of these is a country house and its accoutrements,” said Richard, adding, “I think you should talk to your brother-in-law, Mr Carr.”
When Darcy looked surprised, his mother explained, “Your sister Lizzie has told us of the innumerable offers Mr Carr has rejected from agents who want to buy part of his land. This man could be one of them, although I cannot think why he would be up near Oakleigh; there is not a lot of land one could build on there.”
“Unless he has an interest in the land on Oakleigh Manor,” said Darcy, and both his parents nodded sagely.
“Which is a possibility I would not discount,” said his father. “Your uncle Robert has been promoting the idea for years, but your aunt Emily would never consider it.”
Darcy’s eyes widened in astonishment. “I think I should call on my brother-in-law as soon as possible. There may be more to this than meets the eye,” he said, rising from his chair and preparing to leave.
While Darcy Gardiner planned to call on his sister and her husband at their farm, it was Kate who claimed the first sighting of the stranger. On a visit to Derby, seeing a familiar figure descending the steps of the council chambers, she stopped to ascertain the identity of the gentleman. She was surprised to discover that it was Robert Gardiner, accompanied by someone who fitted exactly the description of the man Teresa had seen, right down to his well-cut suit and stylish hat! They descended the steps to the pavement and stood talking together, looking at their watches, clearly waiting for someone to join them. Kate withdrew into the doorway of a book shop, preparing to disappear within if they appeared likely to move in her direction. Very shortly, the two men were joined by another, who alighted from a hired vehicle and crossed the street, and the three walked up the road and out of sight.
Kate wished she could have followed them, but sensibly decided that she could not do so without attracting their attention. Determined to discover the identity of the man with Robert, she went up the steps into the council chambers. There, she would find a young man, Sam Chiswick, who owed his education and position to her father, for whom he had worked for many years before moving to improve his prospects by taking a job as a clerk in the council. Out of both affection and a sense of loyalty to her father, he had maintained an association with their family, and Kate hoped he would help her now.
Pretending she was there to make a routine enquiry, she sought him out and asked if he could discover the identity of the man who had just been in with Mr Robert Gardiner. She insisted that it was a private but very important matter. The young man was eager to assist, but told her he had to be discreet, which meant she had to wait, which she willingly did, inconspicuously taking a seat on one of the public benches in the waiting hall. Scarcely had she sat down and taken out her book, when the man himself raced up the steps and into the main office, looking exceedingly disturbed.
Kate was very glad that his companions had not thought to follow him in, for then Robert Gardiner would surely have seen her there, and since he was not accompanied by his wife, he may even have felt free to be civil and may have tried to make conversation, which would have been very awkward indeed. As she watched, pretending to be reading her book, the man reappeared with young Sam Chiswick, still agitated and speaking loudly, declaring that he was lunching with Mr Robert Gardiner at his club and if the missing item was found, it sh
ould be immediately returned to him. He was most insistent upon the importance of recovering his property. As Kate watched and listened in amazement, young Sam Chiswick nodded and bowed and agreed to do his very best to find the missing article and return it to the owner.
Presently, the man departed and Sam Chiswick approached Kate. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but I believe this is what you are looking for,” he said softly and held out to her a slim tooled leather wallet, which held a number of cards. Kate could not believe her eyes. “Indeed, how very clever of you to find it, Sam,” she said, and quickly extracting one of the cards, returned the case to him. “Now, you can make an even better impression, by racing down to Mr Robert Gardiner’s club and returning this valuable item to the gentleman, who should be very grateful for your efforts.” Sam bowed and declared that he was about to do just that, once he had obtained his supervisor’s permission to do so.
Kate, smiling, thanked him again and left, unable to hide the supreme satisfaction she felt. She could hardly wait to get home to give her husband the news. The name on the card read Wilson J Croker, broker and developer. The address was an office situated on a smart street in London. The question now was, Whatever was he doing with Robert Gardiner? It was a question that might have been answered quite simply if only Kate had been able to be present at a dinner party that had been held in Derby some days earlier, at the home of one of the richest men in the county.
* * *
Sir William Bilson owed his wealth and his knighthood to the phenomenal success of his scrap metal and rubble business. It had started life as a dust and rubbish collecting operation in the slums of Bolton and Bury with two rag and bone carts and two dustmen, which had eventually spread its tentacles all over the Midlands, sucking up the detritus of industry and turning it into gold—or at least the equivalent of money in the bank. The mansion he had had built for his family in Derby, well away from the dumps of industrial debris that made him his money, occupying as much space as a small village and consuming infinitely more resources, stood as a symbol of the success of this modern alchemist.
Legacy of Pemberley (The Pemberley Chronicles; Pride and Prejudice Sequel Series) Page 7
