Thyme II Thyme Read online

  I shook my head. 'If she did, and I'm pretty certain she didn't, then it went straight past me.'

  'Then we're not that much further on, are we?' Andrea observed.

  Anne-Marie was far more positive. 'I think we could be,' she said encouragingly. 'Before we were chasing Hackleburys and now we're coming down here to chase suitable sized estates, only right up until a few moments ago we had nothing to help us decide which estate might be the right estate, given that we already know there were no large properties registered to a Hacklebury of any description.'

  'So, we just go over all the old maps and records for Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon, and the whole of the south of England while we're at it?' Andrea made no attempt to hide the sarcasm in her voice.

  I held up a hand. 'No, wait a bit,' I said, screwing my face up in an effort to concentrate. 'Let me think a moment... maybe we can narrow it down after all.'

  'Take your time, sweetie.' Anne-Marie stepped on the gas to overtake a crawling Morris Minor estate.

  I looked sideways and pulled a face at the three young children who were pressed against the rear window and making their own variety of faces at us as we sped past. 'Meg definitely wasn't upper class and neither did she sound particularly middle class,' I began, 'but then she could have come from anywhere and it doesn't follow that she had to have been born wherever it was we were. Hacklebury could have picked her up anywhere on his travels, or vice-versa. But those other maids had to be locally born, and their accents were pretty rural, although not strong enough to be real west country. Get as far down as Devon and Somerset and the accent is really thick in the country, and I reckon it would have been thicker still back then without radio and the telly to take the edges off.'

  'So, Hampshire or Dorset, you think?' Anne-Marie prompted me again.

  'Yes, and not that far north in either county,' I concluded. 'Go up thirty miles and they speak as broadly as anyone from cider country.'

  'Along the coast, then?'

  'Maybe, but maybe again, not quite.' I nodded left towards the sea, which was perhaps half a mile away now as the road moved slightly inland. 'Open the window and take a deep breath,' I suggested.

  'Smells of petrol and bird shit,' Andrea said in a most unladylike tone of voice.

  'Smells of salt,' I corrected her, 'what people wrongly refer to as ozone. We all know that smell and yet, because we live near the sea, we take it for granted. Our family home is only a few hundred yards from the shore, so the smell is particularly strong there, but when the wind is in the right direction you can catch a whiff of it inland for a few miles, even at the cottage in Rowland's Castle.'

  'What about seagulls?' Anne-Marie prompted again. 'We often hear them when they come inland. Did you hear any screeching up above when you were back in time?'

  'No,' I replied after a moment, 'but then seagulls tend to drift inland mainly when the weather is a bit dodgy, or they sense a storm brewing, and all the time I was back there it was as flat and calm as it is today and a whole lot warmer. It was midsummer and the sea would have been like a mill pond.'

  'But even so, if you'd been within a mile or two of the coast, you'd have heard something,' Anne-Marie persisted.

  I conceded that she had a point, especially as it fitted in with my own recently formed and still evolving theory. 'So,' I went on, 'I reckon we need to concentrate on a corridor of land stretching east to west over... let's say fifty or sixty miles, and from a point about five miles inland to somewhere around thirty miles north of that.'

  'Oh, that'll make it easy then,' Andrea piped up again.

  I turned and glared at her. 'I'll do something to you that means you'll stay a bloody girl forever if you don't shut up!' I snapped. 'Just pay attention, will you? It's not going to be quite as much needle and haystack as you seem to think. After all, we're looking at an area of maybe eighteen-hundred square miles, which sounds a lot but isn't, not really, not when you consider that most of the country in the area would have been open farmland and what I saw was largely woodland, and lots of it.'

  'A large wooded estate in the middle of the farm belt then,' Anne-Marie declared, nodding. 'Yes, you could be right, Teenie, and if your theory about the accents is on the money, this might take a lot less effort than we thought.'

  I make no pretensions to genius, even if my intelligence level is comfortably above average, but I've always prided myself on being able to think analytically and even laterally. I'm also pretty good with cryptic crosswords and even better at them when I'm drunk, but that's beside the point here. I've also always had this ear for voices, which made me quite a good mimic during my school days, and now this dubious talent, which earned me a few detentions in my time from unimpressed teachers, finally paid off.

  In the main library at Dorchester, pouring over a large map copy dated eighteen forty-five, we found three promising possibilities within minutes and a further check through musty records volumes delivered the final goods.

  'Megan Crowthorne,' Anne-Marie read out loud. 'Registered title of Great Marlins Estate in eighteen forty-one from the previous owner, one Saul Carpenter. Doesn't say how much she paid, if she paid anything at all.'

  'Any other details about her or this Saul Carpenter?'

  'Not here,' Anne-Marie said, shaking her head. 'This is just the bare on who owned what. We'll have to delve into parish records if we want more.'

  'Why not try going back further and finding out who Saul Carpenter got the place from or if it was in his family for years before that?' Andrea suggested, becoming sensible and positive for perhaps the first time since cooking our breakfast.

  'What if Hacklebury was really Saul Carpenter?' Anne-Marie mused. 'Maybe he changed his name?'

  'If he did, then it was after the time I was last there, I'm sure. No, I reckon Carpenter was a different guy and we need to find out more about him.'

  It took another hour but then we had him, and with his family records came the answer to at least another part of the conundrum.

  'Saul Jacob Carpenter, born eighth of May, seventeen seventy-five, married Daisy Hacklebury at Melingford Parish Church, tenth July, eighteen-hundred,' I intoned, reading from our accumulated notes. 'Two children, Rachel and Ruth.'

  'Good Jewish names,' Andrea remarked, chuckling, but she shut up when we both glared at her.

  'No sons though, so our Gregory wasn't directly related,' Anne-Marie stated.

  'He'd have been Gregory Carpenter if he was,' I pointed out.

  She nodded. 'So he came from another branch of the family, maybe a brother or a nephew of Daisy's.'

  'And he was after the estate once Saul died, is my best guess,' I went on. 'What year did it say he died?'

  'Eighteen thirty-seven,' Anne-Marie answered, consulting her notebook. 'And we know Rachel Carpenter predeceased him by six years in that typhoid outbreak, but we still don't have any record of the dates of death of her sister or mother.'

  'Which presupposes they must have moved away before they died,' I concluded.

  'Leaving behind three thousand-plus acres of prime country estate,' Andrea muttered. 'Not so likely, I think.'

  'Unless you consider what two women, one of them by that time quite elderly by the standards of the day, would do with three thousand acres of woodland and a couple of hundred more of tenant farms,' I said. 'I reckon cousin Gregory came on the scene about then and made them an offer they couldn't refuse.'

  'Using the money he knew he would get once he married Angelina,' Anne-Marie added. 'But what about his title? You said they all called him "sir", didn't you?'

  'Yes, and what idiots we are!' I exclaimed. 'That's the one place we haven't checked and it's so obvious I can't believe we missed it. There's a list of titles, isn't there?'

  'I thought we checked that at Portsmouth library?'

  'Yes, but that list was only of hereditary titles, those that have been passed down from father to son. There have always been things like life peerages and lifetime only knighthoods, especially the
ones that were bought from whatever government was seeking to raise money at the time. A few grand could have you dubbed a sir in weeks, from what I've read.'

  'Well maybe,' Andrea said, 'but we ain't gonna find no such list in this sort of dead and alive place. We need somewhere like Somerset House for that.'

  'Or the British Museum,' I suggested.

  'Somerset House, British Museum, it's all the same to me,' Andrea said. 'They're both in London.'

  'So,' I said, sitting back and stretching my cramped shoulders, 'who's for a day in London tomorrow? Carnaby Street isn't what it used to be, but there's always King's Road if we find what we want soon enough.'

  'Some chance of that,' Andrea sniffed. 'We'll be all morning on the train and all afternoon stuck in some dusty reading room. The shops will all be well shut before we get a crack at them.'

  'Then we'll book a hotel and stay a few days,' I said. 'It'll be my treat and a reward for all the help and friendship the pair of you have shown me since we met.'

  'And there's a certain little club I think you might like, Teenie,' Anne-Marie added, grinning. 'You know the place I mean, don't you, Andrea, dear?'

  London in the mid nineteen seventies wasn't quite London in the early or mid nineteen sixties, but then I'd been little more than a tot during the heyday of Carnaby Street and the first invasion of the miniskirt, so I wasn't able to make any accurate comparisons and the London into which we arrived was still a swinging enough place in its own way.

  My money pit wasn't exactly bottomless but it was deep enough and I had originally intended to treat my two friends to a few days in the best luxury money could buy, but then Andrea insisted on travelling as Andrea rather than Andy and Andrea's taste in hemlines and footwear was likely to get us thrown out of most of the higher priced hotels for attempted solicitation of the guests, so we settled for a lesser, although still very comfortable, establishment on the boundary of Fulham and Chelsea just a short tube ride from the centre of the city and close to the fashionable nightspots of the day.

  We travelled up on the train to Waterloo - even in those days the thought of driving in the capital was more than any of us could bear - and took a taxi to the hotel, where we spent a couple of hours settling in and snacking on the bar menu. By then it was already past two o'clock in the afternoon but we resolved to at least make a start on the reason for us being there. Another taxi ride later, we were in Somerset House, home of the records of every hatch, match and dispatch that had ever been recorded anywhere in Britain.

  Now, I think that at this point, and especially for younger readers, I ought to explain that nineteen seventy-five, even though only a little over a quarter of a century ago, was still very much pre-computer age, at least as far as the great majority of the country was concerned, and what might nowadays have taken the three of us no more than an hour, had we spread our efforts over three individual terminals, was likely to entail a day's hard study and even then we were not guaranteed results. Everything back then was large ledgers, scruffy index cards and that marvel of modern data storage, the microfiche. Cross-referencing and trail following had to be done manually and fuzzy matching happened only at the end of a long day when the brain was just about at the end of its tether. That having been said, we did quite well in those few hours left to us on our first day in London.

  Gregory Hacklebury, appointed as a Knight of the Order of St Basil by the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, in November of eighteen thirty-five. Of course, the records didn't say just how much that cost dear Gregory, but it probably paid for at least one new warship, we were all agreed. What this particular record did not reveal was when our errant knight died, but that could wait until later.

  Following the trail backward, we discovered that Gregory Hacklebury was the son of Simon Hacklebury, brother of Daisy, who had become Mrs Carpenter and lady of the estate Gregory had obviously set his cap at. We also discovered that Ruth Carpenter had married one Lieutenant John Hample, whose date of demise was given as eighteen-fifteen, the day of the Battle of Waterloo. There had been, or so it seemed, no offspring from the union.

  'So,' Anne-Marie concluded, sitting back and doodling idly in the margin of the pad upon which she had been tabulating our findings, 'by the time we move on about another twenty years there are just the two Carpenter females and no children to inherit. Meanwhile, Daisy's nephew has somehow contrived to get himself a title and presumably makes an offer for the estate, possibly offering a down payment with a promise of the balance to come once his title and lands have worked the oracle to enable him to marry Angelina and grab her dowry.'

  'That would make sense,' I agreed. 'Daisy would want the family estate to stay in the family, I suppose, and as long as she and Ruth had enough to live out their days in comfort, she would be happy enough with the arrangement. But I wonder where mad Meg came in? I had assumed Meg was a short form for Margaret, but Megan is Welsh, isn't it?'

  'Doesn't necessarily follow,' Andrea said. 'Andrew was the patron saint of Scotland but the nearest I've been to haggis bashing land is probably Nottingham.'

  'It was a bit different back then,' I remarked. 'Names tended to reflect areas and local fashions and Megan is definitely a Welsh name.'

  'Maybe Gregory went Taffy side for a bit and wound up with the manic maid on his travels,' Andrea suggested.

  'I'm not sure that where he found her is important, at least not for our purposes,' Anne-Marie said. 'What we do know is that she ended up with the land and, presumably, whatever was left of Angelina's money.'

  'But we don't yet know what she did with Great Marlins since it doesn't appear on any modern day maps other than as a little hamlet called Marlin Cross,' I pointed out. 'She must have sold it off in sections and it was all split up, although maybe the house is still there under a different name.'

  'I still can't see why we're doing all this,' Andrea protested. 'We know Gregory didn't get what he wanted, so why bother?'

  'Because, we still haven't found out what happened to Angelina and why Meg ended up with the booty,' Anne-Marie replied before I could do no more than open my mouth. 'This is Teenie's family, we think, and she seems to think she's going to end up going back there again, so it's quite possible that if things went tits-up for Gregory, Teenie, as Angelina, might well have played a key part in that, so she needs to know everything we can find out.'

  'It's getting late,' I said, glancing up at the clock, 'and it's been a long day. Why don't we leave it for now and start afresh tomorrow? I could do with a hot bath, a nice meal and maybe a couple of bottles of wine.'

  'Sounds good to me.' Anne-Marie scooped up her pens and pencils and dropped them into her purse. 'And then there's a little nightspot I'd like to show you, the place I mentioned yesterday, which I'm just certain you're going to love!'

  5.

  Bon D'Age. Okay, it wasn't subtle and it certainly wasn't any wordplay in any language I could confirm from my own admittedly limited knowledge, but then it didn't have to be either and the sign was above the inner door and not out on the street, where the main entrance was a plain, black-glossed door set back in an alcove between a second-hand shop and a very old-fashioned looking gentleman's outfitter.

  Just inside the inner entrance, we were stopped by two bouncers in suits who might have given Erik a run for his money, but Anne-Marie produced a small card and we were quickly waved through and down a corridor lit dimly by red lamps, the black painted walls and ceiling reflecting very little of their illumination. We seemed to walk forever, but eventually we came to another door, which opened upon our approach to admit us into a wide foyer where there was a counter and an archway with a sign above it indicating it was the cloakroom. Tall, overly made-up but otherwise stunningly attractive girls manned both the counter and the cloakroom and another hulking brute hovered in the vicinity of another doorway that obviously led into the action.

  The scene beyond that door was, well, not quite as bizarre as it might have been, for although a fair proportion
of the people inside the club were clearly intent on displaying as much of their unorthodox personalities in their outfits and choice of fabrics as possible, there was a decent percentage of patrons who were dressed in a manner that could be considered relatively normal. For my part, I was almost conventionally attired in a silvery mini-dress, black stockings and not-too-extravagant high-heeled platform shoes. Anne-Marie's red suede skirt and plunging top, combined with red suede knee-high boots, would also not have turned more than the usual male head. Only Andrea - as over the top as ever in a leather miniskirt and matching halter, with stocking tops showing at her hemline and spiky heels in silver with glittering mock jewels all over the buckles - was at all outlandish given the usual dress code for a night out in the seventies.

  A statuesque brunette, her all but black hair clearly owing as much to the bottle as to nature, dressed in an ankle-length, figure-hugging dress of what I quickly realised was black rubber, glided over to us on heels that made even Andrea's spikes look modest. Blue eyelids and black liner combined with glitter to produce a localised lightshow every time she blinked and her dark purple lipstick was at once scary and sexy. 'Annie!' she exclaimed, leaning over to hug Anne-Marie. 'It's been weeks, darling!' She straightened up and regarded Andrea and me. 'Hmm,' she purred. 'Well, little miss cocky drawers I know, of course, but who's this darling girl?'

  Anne-Marie introduced us. The Amazon was called Carmen. I suspected her real name was probably something more along the lines of Helen or Sally, but she certainly looked more like a Carmen and I could see immediately that she had taken a shine to me, if only because I seemed to be the only female in the place who came anywhere near to matching her in height.

  'Nice legs,' Carmen whispered close to my ear as she guided us towards the bar, 'but those heels are a bit clumpy. Leave the heavy platforms to the lads, that's what I say.'

  The smell of her rubber dress, combined with her own musk and whatever heavy scent she was wearing, assailed my nostrils and drove deep into my senses, so that I felt half drunk even before she passed me the exotic-looking cocktail. Don't ask me why, and please don't start blaming me for things beyond my control, but as I began to sip at the straw I suspected I was going to end up having some sort of sexual experience with this Carmen and that it would happen before the night was out and I regained the sanctuary of my hotel room.