Searching for Pemberley (12 page)

“The lobby of the Savoy was the scene of quite a brouhaha in 1940,” Jack said almost gleefully. “The East End, where the
docks and warehouses are, took a pounding night after night during the Blitz. The residents didn't think their situation was getting the proper attention, so a crowd of them marched on the Savoy, led by pregnant women and mothers with babes in arms. The marchers closed the restaurant and barricaded themselves in. Some of the group tied themselves to the pillars, while others ran down to the shelters where the hotel kept bunks for the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. It all came to an end when the Savoy's manager wisely ordered tea to be served. That quieted everyone down, and feeling they had made their point, the protestors left.”

After dinner, we went into the hotel lobby, where Jack and Rob discussed the war and the engineering jobs Jack had worked on in India, while Beth and I sat on a sofa just out of earshot of the men. She began by asking me the same questions about Rob my mother was asking in her letters, but without the hysteria. There had never been a Protestant in our family. Beth was amused by my mother's phobia of non-Catholics and told me about Kathleen Kennedy, the Marchioness of Hartington, and the widow of the man who would have become the Duke of Devonshire.

“Mrs. Kennedy was so appalled when she learnt her daughter was going to marry a Protestant that she checked herself into a hospital. When she finally agreed to meet with the press, she was wearing a black dress as if she were in mourning. She wasn't impressed by Billy Hartington's title at all, but her father, a son of Irish immigrants, was delighted. In any event, Kick, as she is known, may lose the title because she seems to be on the verge of marriage with Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. I hope she knows what she is doing. Peter has a reputation for being a player and living in the fast lane.”

Beth returned to the topic of Rob and cautioned me against doing anything hasty. I assured Beth in person and my mother by mail that marriage had not even been mentioned. However, I was thinking about it quite often, but what Rob was thinking was less clear. He knew the words to all the most popular songs, but his favorite was a Western, “Don't Fence Me In.”

“We have come to London to take care of our granddaughter while James and Angela go off on a brief holiday,” Beth said. “I probably won't be able to meet with you again before we go back home, so I thought I'd give you a little bit of Jane and Charles Bingham's story.”

Beth started from the point where Charles came into his majority at the age of twenty-one. “As you can imagine, at that time in his life, Charles had no interest in settling down. He wanted to go to dances, meet young ladies, ride horses, and attend the races at Epsom and Ascot. Until such time as he married, Charles was given a yearly allowance sufficient to meet his needs, as long as he stayed out of London's betting parlors. All that changed once he married Jane.

“Charles built a house on property in the southern part of Derbyshire, about thirty miles from Montclair. He really relished this new stage in his life, and to the end of his days, he remained the country squire, riding about his estate and visiting his neighbors. I imagine it gave some shape to his life.” Shaking her head, Beth said that Charles Bingham had been kept in perpetual boyhood by his brothers and even Will Lacey.

“Bingham Park is a very large manor house, and only the finest materials were used in its construction. Marble and tile workers were brought to England from Italy, and because this project went on for years, the craftsmen sent for their families.
The Italian community built a small church near Leicester with stunning stained glass windows and mosaics. Unfortunately, the original church is gone. In late 1942, Leicester and the surrounding area were heavily bombed, and one of the casualties was this lovely church.”

I knew there were many places of worship that didn't survive the war, the most famous being the fourteenth-century Coventry Cathedral. Numerous churches in London were also destroyed or badly damaged, including several designed by Christopher Wren. However, Wren's greatest creation, St. Paul's Cathedral, survived several close calls, including one in which it was hit with twenty-eight incendiary bombs. One incendiary, penetrating the outer shell of the dome, began to melt the lead, leaving many to believe the cathedral was doomed. Then the miraculous happened; the bomb fell out on to the parapet and failed to explode. One of the war's most famous photographs was of St. Paul's emerging from the smoke of what must have seemed to the people of London to be an entire city on fire. It became a symbol of British resolve to fight through to victory.

Thinking of all the British had suffered, I was glad to return to the Binghams' love story and the nine children that came out of it.

“Charles ran a successful stud farm at Bingham Park and also started a hunting club that still exists. For many years, my parents were subscribers, and I also rode with this club. This was a very important aspect of English society. Members of the British elite visited each other's country estates and went all out running down that little fox. Please keep in mind that foxes were regarded as vermin to be got rid of, much like the coyotes of your American West.

“If I recall correctly, Jane died around 1833, but Charles lived
on for another ten years. For all the difficulties they had in their courtship, Charles and Jane's marriage was a great success.” And suddenly standing up, Beth said, “I have to go to the loo.”

When she returned, Beth wanted to finish up with the Binghams. “The most interesting Bingham was not Charles but his brother, George. He was a financial genius, who helped many of England's elite families who were experiencing financial difficulties, which gave him access to some powerful people. He made a fortune for himself, his family, and his investors from trade with China and India. One of his more lucrative businesses was importing luxury items from France while Britain and France were at war. He believed that trade was a great leveler in society, and since the aristocracy continued to buy these luxuries, he was more than willing to supply them with their perfumes and wines and keep the middle-class shopkeepers employed. You have only to look at the public rooms at Montclair, with all of its French furniture, to see that Will Lacey was of a similar mind. However, George was also an ardent abolitionist, and he left a hefty legacy to the Anti-Slavery Society.”

Motioning to her husband, Beth indicated that it was time for them to go back to their room, as they had a little girl to take care of the next day. Beth kissed me on the cheek, and after doing so, handed me a letter and a small parcel bound up with brown paper and string.

“Being married to Jack, a man who spent his whole career working on challenging projects that improved the lives of others, I have always been troubled by Charles Bingham's willingness to live a life so ordinary when he was in a position to do, I don't know—something—anything. But you can draw your own conclusions from the letters.”

AS SOON AS WE parted company, I complimented Rob on making such a good impression with the Crowells. He addressed Jack as “Sir” and Beth as “Ma'am,” which, he insisted, was a common courtesy in the western United States.

“Flagstaff is in the West, but it isn't exactly Dodge City or Tombstone. I kept my six-shooter holstered whenever possible,” he said, smiling.

Walking to the Underground station, Rob continued, “Oh, by the way, Beth is Elizabeth Lacey, daughter of Sir Edward and Sarah Lacey. Jack told me Beth has a letter for you that will explain all that. They figured you knew.”

I had figured it out long ago. I still did not know why Beth felt it necessary to keep this part of her life secret. But whatever her reasons, I was pleased she finally trusted me enough to tell me.

Rob then shared with me some of his conversation with Jack. “Jack and Beth went out to India when their kids were little because he had gotten a job as an engineer with a railroad
company. They lived in Calcutta and in these hill towns where the women and children went when the hot weather hit. When the kids turned twelve, they went to a boarding school in Scotland. In '34, heading home to England to take the younger son to school, Jack got sick with malaria while going through the Suez Canal. By the time they got to Marseilles, he had to be taken off the ship. Beth took care of him because she had trained as a nurse's aide, a VAD, which stands for Volunteer Aide something, in the First War.

“Anyway, Jack was really sick, and so they stayed in England for more than a year. When he wasn't working on renovating Crofton Wood, which he pretty much gutted because the building was so old, he worked on the Lacey family history. It was Jack who dug out the boring stuff: estate and church records, real estate transactions, military records, Charles Bingham's journal from when he was building Bingham Park, and so on. The reason Beth and Jack know so much about the Edwards family was because, in the summer of 1913, they went on a motor tour to a lot of the places mentioned in
Pride and Prejudice
, and one of their stops was the Edwards farm. The whole idea of a motor tour was cooked up by Beth's youngest brother, Reed, and the grandmother.

“Beth made her debut in 1912 and had a great time during her first season. But her mother considered it to be a bust because Beth didn't get engaged, which was the whole point of being out in society. She didn't think Beth had given the bachelors enough encouragement, and that she had expressed her opinions too freely. Jack said Lady Lacey didn't mind Beth getting a college education, as long as she didn't actually use it.

“It was the grandmother who suggested that if Beth made a
real effort to land a husband during her second season, she should be rewarded by being allowed to go on this car trip with Reed, who would make sketches of all the places mentioned in
Pride and Prejudice
for his grandmother, who loved the novel.

“Beth was allowed to go because she had caught the eye of this guy named Colin Matheson, who was rich, owned thousands of acres in Ireland, and came from a distinguished Anglo-Irish family. Jack said he was one of the most sought-after bachelors at that time, and Beth's mother was convinced that a proposal would be made during the winter season. It all had to be done on the q.t. If word got out that Beth was driving around the countryside without a chaperone, she would have been 'cut' from society because people would question whether or not she was still a virgin. Beth's dad backed her up, saying that all the society bigwigs would be in the south of France for the rest of the summer, and no one would be the wiser. And it all came off without a hitch.

“Get this. The mother agreed that Beth could go on one condition: that Jack go along, because he had been fixing Sir Edward's cars for a couple of years. This is 1913. Beth's twenty and Jack is twenty-two. Jack said that even though the Laceys treated him well, it never occurred to Lady Lacey that her daughter would be interested in the son of a servant or that Jack would act in any way other than as the son of her butler. It was a good thing Jack did go because the car, a 1912 Rolls Royce, broke down and had flats because of the crappy roads.

“That summer, Beth and Jack fell in love. It was on that trip that they went to Desmet Park and Hertfordshire. They found the Edwards/Garrison farm, and it was the three of them, not Aunt Margie, who talked to Mrs. Edwards. Jack said there's a story that
goes with Aunt Margie, but he'd tell us at another time. They found Netherfield Park, which was actually Helmsley Hall, but it had been converted into a private girls' school, and Winchester Cathedral where Austen is buried. Reed made sketches of all these places.

“For Jack, it was the best summer of his life, and he said, 'I was head over heels for Beth, but she would be returning to Newnham College, and I would be going back to The Tech in Manchester. I could hardly believe she was interested in me at all, and I was afraid that once she got back to Cambridge, she'd come to her senses and throw me over. And then the war! My God! No one could have foreseen the bloodbath that was just a year down the road. During the war, I'd think back to that summer with Beth and Reed, and sometimes when I was standing in the mud and muck in France, seeing my mates come back in pieces or not at all, it would keep me from blowing my brains out.'”

Because I pictured Jack Crowell as a tower of strength, I could not imagine him taking his own life. But could I really get my mind around just how awful trench warfare in northern France had been during the First World War, and wasn't it possible that there might be a breaking point, even for a man as strong as Jack?

“Jack also told me that his younger brother, Tom, was killed on the Somme in July 1916. That was all he had to say, and I didn't ask for details.”

From the time I had first met Jack, when he had mentioned the town memorial to those killed in The Great War, I knew that someone he cared about was memorialized on the stone monument on the village green. I remembered Jack telling me about
Harvest Home and the two brothers walking the children around the fountain on ponies. His face had lit up at the memory.

My head was bobbing up and down on Rob's shoulder as we rode the Underground to Mrs. Dawkins's house. An occasional grunt reassured Rob that I was listening.

“By the way, I'm having dinner with Jack at the Engineer's Club on Wednesday. He thinks by that time he'll be climbing the walls, being in such a small flat with two females, even if one of them is only a baby.”