Beth
At that moment, I had only one thought, and it was not a pleasant one. As a young girl, the view from my bedroom was of a towering coal breaker bearing down on the town like some industrial monster. Everything in Minooka was covered with a fine layer of soot, and the smell of sulfur permeated the air. A way to escape this bleak landscape was to disappear into other worlds as created by authors like the Brontës, Dickens, Alcott, and Mark Twain. But of all the authors I had ever read, my favorite was Jane Austen. I loved everything she wrote, but I particularly loved Pride and Prejudice. I had read it so many times that I had memorized large passages, like an actor would study the lines of a play.
I was willing to accept that Jane Austen had somehow heard of the story that would form the basis of Pride and Prejudice. All the letters and family history supported the Crowells’ belief that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy were actually Elizabeth Garrison and William Lacey of Montclair in Derbyshire. But how was it possible for the author to know what Elizabeth and Will had said to each other? The only explanation was that Jane Austen had read Elizabeth Garrison’s diary, and this seemed to me to be improbable if not impossible. Was Beth in possession of a forged diary that had been written after Jane Austen’s novel had been published in 1813?
I told Rob of my concerns, but he doubted the Crowells would be fooled by a forgery. He reminded me that this diary was only one of several. If Elizabeth’s handwriting had differed from one journal to the next, it would have been noticed.
“Listen, Maggie, Beth had to have thought about all of these things, too. I suggest you go to Crofton and ask her.”
Chapter 23
While Rob was away in the North of England on a work assignment, I decided to take a break from too much overtime at the Army Exchange Service. I did go to Crofton but left the parcel at Mrs. Dawkins’s house because I wanted to reread all that Beth had sent to me.
After Jack picked me up at the station, we drove up to Montclair, so that I could meet Freddie. Instead of parking next to the fountain, he drove around back to the servants’ entrance, and said, “Home, Sweet Home.” We walked through a labyrinth until we got to the kitchen area where Freddie was sitting on a stool and reading the sports pages. When we came into the kitchen, he put out his cigar and jumped up to greet us. Jack made the introductions, and I told Freddie I was thrilled to finally meet the real master of Montclair. Freddie, who was short and wiry, gave off a nervous intensity that came at you in waves, and although he had been living in England for more than twenty years, his accent was Australian through and through.
Referring to that day’s newspaper, he said, “I was checking yesterday’s scores to see how much money I won. I done all right. Do you bet, Maggie?” I said I bought Irish lottery tickets, and he doubled over laughing and slapped the counter. “That’s not betting, dear; that’s shopping.”
After he stopped laughing, he said, “Don Caton and ‘her highness’ are in London, so why don’t you have a look around.”
“By myself?”
“Well, I’ll have to pat you down when you get back to make sure you didn’t pinch nothing, and I’m very thorough.” I looked to Jack to see if Freddie was serious, and he just laughed.
“This is the backstairs the junior servants had to use at all times,” Jack said as we climbed the staircase. “It leads to the male and female living quarters on the third floor. Before cars, the permanent help had to live on site, but by the late 1920s, it was getting so hard to keep servants, they were allowed to live down in the village. Once things like Hoovers, dishwashers, and washing machines came into use, it wasn’t necessary to have so many servants, but by that time, I was long gone.”
“But your living area was downstairs?”
“Yes, and the cook’s too. The rooms where my family lived are used by Freddie now. All the work the servants used to do, including the cooking, is now hired out. If the Catons were to have a big affair, they would actually rent a butler. If you just felt a shift in the earth, it was my father turning over in his grave.”
Jack and I stepped through a door into the main section of the house where Beth’s parents had their suite of rooms. Each had their own bedroom, which was the normal arrangement among England’s upper class. Jack said the Pratts used only Lady Lacey’s room, “which Mrs. Caton started redecorating as soon as the Pratts reached the end of the driveway.”
“Mrs. Caton doesn’t hide the fact that she thinks the Pratts had no taste. It’s true they were hard on that house, but they were a small part of a big problem. A two-hundred-year-old house needs constant attention. Plaster cracks, wallpaper becomes unglued, chimneys get clogged with soot, drains back up, and that’s during peacetime. When the First War came, maintenance fell by the wayside, and it took the Catons and their deep pockets to repair what time and neglect had done.”
Jack opened the door to a bedroom adjoining Lady Lacey’s. “This used to be Beth’s father’s room. The sleigh bed and armoire were so large, they left them with the house.”
“Beth was very close to her father, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“Yes, until Lucy Arminster, his lady friend in London, put in an appearance. Beth and Reed went to live in New York where they stayed with Lady Lacey’s sister until their parents ironed out that mess. It would have been disastrous for Reed if his parents had gotten a divorce. But that didn’t seem to have occurred to either parent with Lady Lacey storming off to America, and Sir Edward chasing a young woman around town.” He shook his head and said, “Let’s have a look at Beth’s room.”
We walked down the hall to Beth’s bedroom in the east wing. Mrs. Caton had recently finished refurbishing Beth’s room and had been able to locate the original wallpaper pattern, a pale green, with delicate white flowers, and branches with tiny birds sitting on them.
Jack gestured for me to join him on the balcony. Beth’s room was on the north side of the house, facing the gardens, and had an extraordinary view of the estate. Between Montclair and Stepton were acres and acres of rolling pastureland, sectioned off with rock walls, and hundreds of fluffy white dots moving around in the distance. It looked just like a scene from a postcard of rural England.
“Reed had the same view from his bedroom, and he painted it every which way from Sunday.” This was the scene that had inspired Reed to draw the four sketches hanging in the Crowell’s den that I had admired when I first met Beth and Jack. “He was unbelievably talented and could work in any medium. But from the time he came back from America, with the exception of Beth and my brother, Tom, you’d never see an adult face in his drawings. I guess he felt betrayed by the grown-ups in his life.”
We walked down the long hallway to the west wing where Jack pointed to door after door. “These rooms were for Trevor and Matt. They had their own bedrooms, bathroom, game room with gramophone, and a kitchen that had originally been part of the nursery and classroom. To say they were overindulged doesn’t get there by half.” Shaking his head, Jack said, “They were my mates, and I can honestly say they never pulled rank on me or Tom. But the way they lived, with no consequences or responsibilities, was hard to take.
“But having said that, I think both of them would have turned out all right if they had survived the war. When Trevor was working in the brokerage house in London for his father, he told me he realized that it was time to grow up. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he knew he was not going to be a broker. He wanted to visit America, which of course, was where Ellen and his daughter were living.
“Matt was the big surprise. He was a good, strong leader, and I think he might have stayed in the Army. The Laceys got lots of letters from the men who served under him, all of them saying what an exceptional officer he was. Matt told me that at his worst, he was a better officer than any of the generals calling the shots. He was right about that.”