Charbury was not even a village. A hamlet of no more than fifteen houses, a church and a village store. There wasn’t even a pub any longer and half the cottages were empty, only the old folk left. The younger people had departed long ago for war work or service in the armed forces.
It was raining that morning as Sir Maxwell Shaw walked down the village street, a black Labrador at his heels. He was a heavily built man of medium height, face craggy, the evidence of heavy drinking there and the black moustache didn’t help. He looked morose and angry much of the time, ready for trouble and most people avoided him.
He wore a tweed hat, the brim turned down, a waterproof shooting jacket and Wellingtons. He carried a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun under one arm. When he reached the store he bent down and fondled the Labrador’s ears, his face softening.
‘Good girl, Nell. Stay.’
A bell tinkled as he went in the shop. There was an old man in his seventies leaning against the counter talking to a woman behind who was even older.
‘Morning, Tinker,’ Shaw said.
‘Morning, Sir Maxwell.’
‘You promised me some cigarettes, Mrs Dawson.’
The old lady produced a package from beneath the counter. ‘Managed to get you two hundred Players from my man in Dymchurch, Sir Maxwell. Black market, I’m afraid, so they come expensive.’
‘Isn’t everything these days? Put it on my bill.’
He put the package in one of his game pockets and went out. As he closed the door he heard Tinker say, ‘Poor sod.’
He took a deep breath to contain his anger and touched the Labrador. ‘Let’s go, girl,’ he said and went back along the street.
It was Maxwell Shaw’s grandfather who had made the family’s fortune, a Sheffield ironmaster who had risen on the high tide of Victorian industrialization. It was he who had purchased the estate, renamed Shaw Place, where he had retired, a millionaire with a baronetcy, in 1885. His son had shown no interest in the family firm which had passed into other hands. A career soldier, he had died leading his men into battle at Spion Kop during the Boer War.
Maxwell Shaw, born in 1890, had followed in his father’s footsteps. Eton, Sandhurst, a commission in the Indian Army. He served in Mesopotamia during the First World War, came home in 1916 to transfer to an infantry regiment. His mother was still alive, Lavinia, his younger sister by ten years, was married to a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and herself serving as a nurse. In 1917 Maxwell returned from France badly wounded and with an MC. During his convalescence he met the girl who was to become his wife at the local hunt ball and married her before returning to France.
It was in 1918, the last year of the war, when everything seemed to happen at once. His mother died, then his wife, out with the local hunt, when she took a bad fall. She’d lasted ten days, long enough for Shaw to rush home on compassionate leave to be with her when she died. It was Lavinia who had supported him every step of the way, kept him upright at the graveside, yet within a month she, too, was alone, her husband shot down over the Western Front.
After the war, it was a different world they inherited like everyone else and Shaw didn’t like it.
At least he and Lavinia had each other and Shaw Place although as the years went by and the money grew less, things became increasingly difficult. He was a Conservative Member of Parliament for a while and then humiliatingly lost his seat to a Socialist. Like many of his kind, he was violently anti-Semitic and this, exacerbated by the crushing political blow, led to his involvement with Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist Movement.
In all this, he was backed by Lavinia although her main interest lay in trying to keep their heads above water and hanging on to the estate. Disenchanted with the way society had changed and their own place in it, again like many of their kind, they looked to Hitler as a role model, admired what he was doing for Germany.