One of the men in the class interrupted.
‘But everything’s available on the internet now, isn’t it? I’ve traced my family back to 1500 without leaving home. I don’t see any point in going to record offices.’
Rob resisted the temptation to say,
‘If that’s what you think, why have you come to this class?’ Instead, he replied, ‘But not everything is available on the internet. You can build up a pedigree – names and dates – but you can’t find those details that really bring your ancestors to life. And the internet doesn’t let you see and handle an actual document your ancestor might have seen and handled.’
The man looked unconvinced. Rob shuffled through his papers.
‘Listen.’ He read aloud.
The said Mary Seale, widdow, testatrix aforesaid, at the time of her making and publishing of her will as aforesaid, was shutt up of the plague in the house of John Hutchens her late brother in the parish of Saynt Martin in the Citty of Wynderbury, where within short time after shee dyed of the infection of the plague. And before that time her aforesaid brother John Hutchens dyed of the same disease.
Rob paused and looked at the man, to see if he had made his point. The man sat back in his chair, folding his arms. Some of the others looked interested, though. One of the women asked,
‘How would I find out something like that about my ancestors?’
‘Well,’ Rob began, ‘A lot depends on what sort of people your ancestors were.’
Emily cornered Rob at the coffee break. Her new find, bought in a local secondhand bookshop, was a history of the Finch family, written by an Edward Finch and published in 1745. It was typical of hundreds of such books produced by country gentlemen who wanted to provide for themselves a more illustrious ancestry than was actually the case, and who had the leisure to write and the money to have the work privately published. Leafing through, Rob saw the usual tales of forebears who came over with the Conqueror and distinguished themselves on Crusade. But the book was in very good condition and was, Rob thought, quite rare, so he was able to congratulate Emily on her find.
‘But Rob, look, this is what I wanted to show you,’ she said. He was still holding the book; Emily reached over and turned the pages. There was writing in some of the margins and on the endpapers.
‘Can you read it?’ Emily looked at him hopefully. Rob looked back at her. She should really be able to read the handwriting herself. As a teacher, he was not helping her to learn if he read it for her. But Emily did not really want to learn; she just wanted someone to share her family history with. And she was a sweet and generous old lady who had more than once entertained Rob to tea at her house.
‘Would you like me to look at it for you?’ he said.
The class finished, Rob made his way back to his house a short walk from the city centre. The streets were busier now, the Friday night crowds spilling out of the bars and clubs. Rob turned into the quieter backstreets, crossing the road to avoid a gang of teenagers hanging around a bus shelter.
Having stopped to pick up a takeaway meal for his supper, he turned into his own street of late Victorian terraced houses with front doors opening directly on to the pavement. Fumbling in his pocket for his front door key, he dodged around the scaffolding against the front of the house next door to his. Currently the roof at the front of that house was covered with tarpaulin, the old slates having been stripped off a week ago. The house had been empty for most of the time Rob had lived in the street, but had been sold several weeks ago. It was now being renovated by a man about Rob’s age, apparently in his spare time; he was mostly there at weekends and in the evenings.
Rob let himself into his own house and closed the door. The house was small, and, in estate agents’ language, ‘in need of some updating’, but it was Rob’s own, and he never ceased to be grateful to the grandparent whose legacy had made that possible. He had endured more than enough of rented accommodation and communal living.
He kicked off his shoes in the hall and went through to the main part of the house. Two rooms had been knocked into one by a previous owner. At the front it was furnished as a sitting room. At the other end was Rob’s worktable with his laptop and printer. Books and papers were stacked on the table, on the bookshelves and on the floor. Their arrangement looked haphazard, but Rob knew what was in each pile. He dumped his backpack on the floor by the worktable and went through to the kitchen to fetch cutlery with which to eat his meal. Returning to the front room, he turned on the lights, closed the curtains and switched on the television, then sat down to eat his supper straight from the containers, feet on the coffee table.
According to the television news, there was a new report out about the increasing levels of stress experienced by everyone in their daily lives. Yet more evidence, Rob thought, that he was somehow out of sync with modern life. The most stressful thing he had had to do that day was decide whether to have fish and chips or Indian or Chinese food for supper. Unless you counted the decision not to have a haircut. On the other hand, what did it say about him, that these were the two most important decisions he had made that day, and here he was, at home alone on a Friday night, with every prospect of being home alone again on Saturday night.
Chapter Two
Any hopes Rob might have had of sleeping late the next morning ended when he was woken at an ungodly hour by noise in the street outside. Something was being delivered to the house next door; he could hear a heavy vehicle, and men shouting. After twenty minutes of holding his pillow over his head, Rob gave up the attempt to sleep, pulled a sweatshirt on over his pyjamas and stumbled downstairs to the kitchen. Glancing out of his bedroom window on the way, he saw the builder from next door standing on the pavement talking on his mobile phone. Judging from his body language, he was not happy.
Rob took his coffee and biscuits through to his workroom and began to unpack his backpack, which was still lying where he had dropped it the night before. He skimmed through Emily’s book. It proved to be much as he expected. It followed the history of the Finch family, actual or fictional, from Norman times onwards, their acquisition of estates by legitimate means or otherwise, and their rise to wealth and prominence in county affairs. When the story reached the sixteenth century, the author recorded the marriage in 1545 of a Catherine Finch to a Sir Thomas Mildmay. Rob knew that the Mildmays, like the Finches, were long established in the county, with numerous branches, knights and gentlemen of modest wealth and status.
A short time after his marriage this Sir Thomas came into possession of the manor of Ashleigh. That manor had in the time of King Henry V been granted to one William Amory, following, it is said, some service done for the King by that William. His son John, being the first of that line to be knighted, continued in the service of the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of York, until...
Rob wondered if the William Amory who had written the Commonweal in the late sixteenth century belonged to the same family. Skipping ahead, he saw that Edward Finch spent a couple more pages digressing into the history of the Amory family. Before he could read further, someone began to bang on the front door. He tried to ignore it, but whoever it was did not seem to be going away. He put the book safely away on a bookshelf and went to the door.
His visitor was the man from the house next door, in zipped up jacket and woolly hat pulled well down over his forehead. He was shorter than Rob, and more solidly built, with a confident, even cocky, air.
‘Look mate, sorry to bother you, but you could’t give me a hand, could you?’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Rob asked cautiously.
‘Help me shift that lot.’ He indicated the pallets in the street behind him. They were roof tiles, Rob now saw. ‘My mate’s let me down, and I can’t leave them there. Some s.o.b.’ll walk off with them, or I’ll get done for obstructing the street. There’s seventy quid in it for you, cash in hand,’ he added, as Rob still hesitated. ‘That’s what I was going to give my mate.’
Seventy pounds for a fe
w hours’ work was money Rob could not afford to turn down.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just give me some time to – ’ He gestured vaguely towards his pyjamas.
‘OK. I’m Chris, by the way.’
‘Rob. Um – would you like some coffee while you’re waiting?’
‘Nah, s’OK. I had some while I was waiting for the tiles.’
Rob’s task, he learned, was to load the tiles, a few at a time, into a kind of cradle Chris had rigged up, then haul the cradle up to roof level by a rope which ran through a pulley at the top of the scaffolding. There, Chris removed the tiles from the cradle and stacked them on the roof ready to lay. The arrangement looked as if it had been improvised from whatever Chris had to hand, and Rob doubted if this was how it was done on big building projects. But it worked well enough, although Rob could see why two men were needed.
Rob was surprised to find that, once he had settled into a rhythm, he was enjoying himself. The physical activity felt good. He walked a lot, but did not take much other exercise. He and Chris were too far apart to make conversation easy, so as he worked, Rob’s mind was free to exercise itself as it pleased. It was demanding work, though. He thought his arms and shoulders would be aching the next day. He was glad of the thick gloves Chris had tossed him before they started. He was not especially fussy about his hands, but he did need to be able to hold a pen or pencil and use a keyboard.
Over lunch of burgers and chips, eaten sitting on the pile of tiles still to be shifted, they talked. Chris worked in the building trade, for a small local company.
‘Extensions, loft conversions, kitchens and bathrooms, you name it,’ he said. ‘A while ago, we were doing up some of those houses in Charlotte Street. Bloke managed to get his hands on three of them.’
Rob knew the properties Chris meant – Regency houses that had been divided into flats and bedsits and become very run down.
‘We turned them back into family houses,’ Chris said. ‘All en suite bathrooms and flash new kitchens. The bloke reckoned to make a tidy bit on the job.’
‘Are you going to live here when you finish doing it up?’
‘Nah. I’m going to sell it. Should make a pretty good profit. Then buy another one, do the same again.’ Within a couple of years he hoped to be able to work at it full time and tell his current boss ‘where to shove’ his job.
‘Since Charlotte Street, it’s mostly been rubbish work,’ he said. ‘Knocking stuff down, digging holes for other blokes to come and do their stuff. We keep moving from one job to another, never know what we’re going to be doing from one week to the next.’
‘Seems a waste of a skilled workforce,’ Rob ventured.
‘Yeah, well, it’s not about skill these days, is it? It’s all qualifications and certificates. Never mind whether you can actually do the job, no-one wants to know you if you haven’t got the pieces of paper. You need a card to say you can dress yourself, you’ll need one to say you can wipe your arse soon.’
Because he’d been saving up for this first job, Chris still lived with his mum in her flat, along with his sister and her kid. It was a bit crowded with all of them there, and the kid would need his own room soon, so before he gave up his paid job he wanted to use some of his profit to put down a deposit on a house for himself. A new build. He was not into old stuff.
‘The agent who showed me this place was going on about period features and how they can add thousands to the value. Fireplaces, windows, doors, and all that crap. But I tell you, it costs a few thousand to find them and fit them, too. And I wouldn’t know what was the right stuff to get. I just want to do this place up quick, sell it for a tidy sum, and move on to the next one.’
They worked until it was beginning to get dark. Rob’s arms, shoulders and legs were aching, but he thought that for his first day as a builder’s labourer he had not done too badly. The roof was not finished, although Rob thought they had made good progress; Chris was an efficient worker who did not waste time.
Chris re-secured the tarpaulin over the roof. They carried the rest of the tiles into the house and stacked them on the bare floorboards in the front room. Chris pulled off his woollen hat, leaving his short fair hair sticking up on end. He eyed Rob consideringly.
‘Don’t suppose you’d be up for another day tomorrow? Fifty quid? There’s not so much to do, we should finish earlier.’
‘I wouldn’t mind. But I doubt I’ll be able to move tomorrow. I’m not used to labouring like that. I wouldn’t want to take your money when I couldn’t do a fair day’s work.’
‘Fair enough. I can probably get someone else to come tomorrow. Fancy a drink?’
What Rob really fancied was a long soak in a hot bath, but it seemed ungracious to refuse, so he said,
‘All right.’
Chris took him to a pub he did not know, in a backstreet a few minutes’ walk away. When they were sitting with their drinks, Chris took a wad of notes from an inside pocket, peeled off three twenties and a ten and pushed them across the table to Rob.
‘Lucky for you I don’t work for HMRC,’ said Rob, tucking the notes away in his own pocket.
‘Nah, I didn’t have you down as a taxman. Teacher, maybe, is what I thought.’ He looked questioningly at Rob.
‘Sort of. I do teach, part time.’
Chris looked pleased that his guess was right.
‘What school? You don’t look the type to deal with the little s.o.b.s at the school I went to, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not when I think what I was like. Half the time I didn’t go, and the other half I just gave ’em cheek.’
‘No, I don’t teach at a school. I teach adult education classes. History,’ he added, anticipating Chris’s next question.
‘Part time, you said? What do you do the rest of the time?’
‘I work part time at the county record office.’
‘The what?’
‘The place where all the historical records of the county are kept. Documents, maps, photographs, all kinds of things. There’s material there going back to the Middle Ages – more than seven hundred years old.’
Chris was unimpressed.
‘Why keep a lot of old stuff?’
‘Well, people use it for research. Local history, family history. Legal enquiries, sometimes.’
‘OK. So what else do you do?’
‘I’m researching a thesis for a Ph. D.’
‘A what for a what?’
‘A thesis. It’s – I research a subject – something no-one has researched before – and write about it – up to a hundred thousand words – and submit it to the University. If it passes, I get a Ph. D. – a degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I can call myself Doctor.’
Rob was not used to having to explain all this. He wondered if he was putting it too simply and Chris would think he was being patronising. On the other hand, if he made the explanation too complicated, would it seem as if he was trying to make Chris look stupid because he did not know these things?
‘But not a proper doctor, right?’ Chris was saying. ‘Not in a hospital, I mean.’
‘I will be a proper doctor, but no, not a doctor of medicine.’
‘So how long does this take?’
‘I’ve been working on it three years or so, on and off. Maybe another three. It depends whether I have to take a break from it to earn some money, if I can’t manage on what I get at the record office and for the teaching.’
‘I don’t get it. You don’t get paid for doing this, right? And while you’re doing it, you can’t get a proper job so you can get paid for doing something else?’
Rob winced at the ‘proper job’, having heard it too many times before, but he said,
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘I find out stuff that nobody ever knew before.’
‘Like what?’
‘Um – like about people who lived in Wynslade more than four hundred years ago, how they lived, what they earned.’
‘So who cares?’
‘Other historians, and – and everyone should care. It’s all about us, how we got to where we are today.’
‘Like I said, who cares?’
‘Don’t you ever wonder, when you work on a house – like the ones in Charlotte Street, they’re two hundred years old – or even your own house, that’s over a hundred years old – don’t you wonder who lived there, what they did, what they were like?’
‘No, couldn’t give a toss.’
Rob thought, trying to find some way of explaining the fascination of research to Chris. He was well into his second pint on an empty stomach, and was aware of being slightly drunk. So he was going to have a hangover tomorrow to go with all the aches and pains from his work as a builder’s labourer. Great.
‘Look, when you do a good job on a house, how does it feel?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, when you’ve done something, and it’s turned out well, aren’t you pleased with it?’
‘Well – yeah – I suppose.’
‘That’s how I feel about doing research. When I’ve finished my thesis, I’ll feel like you’ll feel when you've finished that house.’
‘But I’ll make money from that house. You’re not going to make any money out of what you do.’
‘But someone could buy that house and rip out all the work you’ve done, maybe even knock the house down altogether. There’ll be nothing left of your work for anyone to see. But my thesis will be there for ever.’
They sat in silence for a while. The beer and the tiredness were combining to make Rob feel pleasantly woozy. He said suddenly,
‘I just thought of something.’
‘What?’
‘My name’s Tyler.’
‘So?’
‘So that means one of my ancestors, way back in the Middle Ages, actually was a tiler. It’s an occupational name.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ said Chris, plainly humouring him.
The Plantagenet Mystery Page 2
