She ended on an apologetic note, half expecting Hadstock to laugh, half hoping he would produce some rational explanation of it all, as he had done when consulted about Simon’s behaviour over the trunk. When at last he spoke his words fell heavily upon her hopes of comfort.
‘I think you’re still a bit short of the mark,’ he said. ‘My lady, does the name Medmenham mean anything to you?’
‘Medmenham? I don’t think … no, nothing. Why?’
‘It is a place in Buckinghamshire,’ Hadstock said. ‘And there, only forty years ago, in this enlightened eighteenth century, a little group of gentlemen used to worship the Devil. That is known fact. The moving spirit of the group was a Sir Francis Dashwood, and they used to call themselves “The Franciscans” and dress up as monks of that order, the more perversely to indulge in every kind of vice and debauch. It sounds like nonsense, doesn’t it; childish, nasty nonsense … but there was more in it. After all, a belief in God presupposes a belief in the Devil, doesn’t it? There is Biblical evidence; if you believe that Christ said “Love your enemies” you should also believe that He said, “Get thee hence, Satan.” Anyway, one of these Franciscans —they also called themselves the Hell Fire Club—a man called Baker, went mad and died, raving, in the same lodging-house where a man who had some talent at verse-making lived. Baker’s ravings, just as they emerged, but shaped into rhyme, went into a broadsheet which had a tremendous sale in London in 1762. There was a great scandal and the Hell Fire Club broke up the next year. Most of the members died violently, or untimely. But Alec
Mundford lived on … just as Baker said was promised him. I should remind you, my lady.’ said Hadstock with a slight smile, ‘that the broadsheet was sheer doggerel. In its own words, the promise to Mr Mundford was—
Thou shall live on and wondrous luck shall know, Until of life and luck thou has enowI When thou art weary thou shalt make thy plea In the right hour and I will come for thee!
And I know it sounds crazy and far-fetched to the point of fantasy; but, like you, I’ve thought and thought about it, and I have come to believe…’ ‘What, Mr Hadstock?’
‘That Mr Mundford is attempting to re-form, here, the Hell Fire Club. I think that trunk contained clothes … vestments—probably those same monks costumes from Medmenham—and the set of church plate. And I think you were right about the place. They must have stumbled upon the other entrance.’
‘From the cellars,’ Linda said. ‘You remember Farrow said it would be somewhere under the house I Oh, and I remember now … Woods—do you remember the butler named Woods? On Mr Mundford’s very first visit, in the middle of the night, Woods roused the house saying there was someone in the cellar. He’d been out very late and came in and heard voices or saw a light or something. They —Mr Mundford and my husband—couldn’t be found for a moment, then they appeared, and my husband was very angry. He said he had taken Mr Mundford down to choose a bottle of wine and that Woods was drunk to be making such a fuss. Woods left soon after. It’s funny, isn’t it, how everything seems to fit in, and yet all adds up to something so ridiculous I’
‘There’s a side to it that is not ridiculous, my lady,’ Hadstock said. ‘It’s a free country … nobody minds what they do except in so far as it involves … It’s you I mind for, my lady.’
‘Well, of course,’ she said, making an effort to be reasonable,
‘I am not much involved. Richard would never .,.’ She broke off as she realised she had referred in this informal way to Richard. ‘And we have no proof, have we?’ she went on hastily.
‘And if we had there’s very little we could do.’ Hadstock’s voice was suddenly heavy. ‘At least, you, my lady … Would it not be possible for you to make a prolonged visit somewhere until this has blown over, whatever it is?’
He looked so troubled that she said, more brightly:
‘Why, yes, of course, I could always do that. But I think I have been making a fuss about nothing. It’s strange how bothersome, puzzling things grow less when one talks them over, isn’t it? I am so glad I can talk to you.’
‘Well, I’m there to be talked to, or called upon, if ever there is anything I can do. In fact I’m entirely at your service, my lady.’ He brought out the last sentence with a mocking imitation of a fine gentleman’s formal utterance of the phrase.
‘I know. And I’m very grateful,’ Linda said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Once again Matt Ashpole had been foresighted. So far all his plans and schemes had gone wrong, but it was difficult to see what could go wrong with this one. He’d obtained several old pine trees and a two-handed saw; and having worked at it with his wife and those of his children still at home just long enough to demonstrate the management of the tool, he had set them to saw five-foot lengths and then split them into fencing stakes. There’d been a slight difficulty with Mrs Ashpole, who protested that it was not woman’s work.
‘Don’t be a dunderhead,’ Matt said. ‘Stand to reason, don’t it, I can’t stand here a-sawing—that is unless you’d care to take owd Gyp and knock up a living for us. We gotta eat till them stakes are ready and sold.’ Mrs Ashpole, who was as fond of her food as any woman, saw the force of that argument and later used it herself. As soon as Matt had gone off in the cart she abandoned her end of the saw, saying, ‘Now you boys get on. Stand to reason I can’t stand here a-sawing—that is unless one of you’d care to make a stew. We gotta eat!’ She did more cooking in the next few weeks than she had done in the previous two years. She also kept the boys at work by the simple expedient of setting so much work to be done before food was served. The pile of stakes grew steadily. There would soon be a brisk demand for them. The commissioners had borne in mind the European situation. England and France were at war, the island kingdom must feed itself or go hungry; not even the enclosure of Clevely must be allowed to reduce, by one
grain, the year’s harvest. A greater yield next year must be arranged for in every possible way. So they had ruled that the Waste should be fenced by the end of May— which would give its new owners a chance to plough it if they intended to try cultivation, or to gather a hay crop; and Old Tom and Layer were to be fenced by the end of November. Any land remaining unfenced by that date was forfeited. As Mr Sawston truly said, ‘Any man who can’t afford to fence after harvest must be a very inefficient farmer and should not have land at all.’
By the end of May the fences were up, and on some claims the ploughs were out. The desperate situation which Matt had foreseen, when the Waste Cottages lay landless between the fence and the highroad, had come about. There were other Waste-dwellers, more blindly optimistic, or too stupidly incredulous to be taken by surprise.
Mrs Palfrey was one of these. Spitty, her husband, was no good; he was frail in body and feeble in mind, the last to get a job when seasonal labour was in demand, the first to lose it. Mrs Palfrey had kept food in the many mouths of her large family by growing potatoes, rearing a pig on the potato peelings, and keeping a few geese and hens. Nine pregnancies and several miscarriages had not interfered with her simple yearly routine. She had always begun to plant her potatoes on Good Friday; and on that date, in 1797, she planted them as usual, despite the warnings of more far-sighted persons who told her she would never gather the crop. All through her married life she had done her best, and that included planting potatoes; her dim mind could not visualise a future which did not include a potato crop.
Three weeks later she stood by the brand-new fence which stood within an arm’s length of her hovel door and watched the ploughshare turn out the potatoes—‘All sprouted beautiful,’ as she said. She shed no tears, for she had learned the futility of them in the first four years of her life; she stood and watched with an expression of
dumb-animal hopelessness on her face and then went in and shut the door. She had four geese and six hens in the precarious shelter of Matt Juby’s half-acre; she had enough potatoes to last until late July. ‘There’ll be no taters this year; we can’t live athout taters,’ she said to herself, over and over again. Two more of the children must get work: Emmeline, aged nine, who, like Spitty, was not quite bright; and Tommy, seven. And she herself must leave the younger ones to Spitty’s care and go Out to work. In June she made hay at Wood Farm and earned eight shillings; in July she picked stones from a section of the newly ploughed Waste—twopence a bushel they paid her and she earned fifteen shillings. The one hundred and seventy bushels of stones, did, as she said, ‘drag you down a bit’; but by August she knew that the down-dragging was not all due to the stones. She was pregnant again. Soon she would be unemployable, since lithe active women were ten a penny. In the old days she could go out and dig a few potatoes and catch her breath and lean on the spade, her own woman, on her own plot; now there’d be nothing for it but to starve or go on the parish I Nobody looking at her, gaunt, despairing, ragged, dirty creature as she was, would have credited her with any pride; yet she had been proud—proud of the fact that, though they had been hungry, and cold, and barefooted, they’d never yet been on the parish…