Searching for Pemberley (17 page)

Rob leaned forward so that I could scratch his back and continued to read from his notes. “It was Lady Marianne Lacey who started a tradition of having a Christmas tea for all the servants. They were invited upstairs to join the Laceys in the breakfast room for a catered buffet. Beth and Lady Lacey took turns playing the piano, and the whole gang sang carols. The last time they had it was Christmas 1914. Trevor was killed the following September, so that was the end of that tradition.”

“Were you surprised when you found out Beth's brothers had been killed in the war?”

“Not really. We knew about Jack's brother, right? And we knew Beth had brothers she never talked about? I figured the reason for all the secrecy was that the brothers were dead and not in a good way. I'm still not sure what happened to the youngest brother.”

“Well, I was stunned when she told me. She looked so sad that I changed the subject to her children. She said she thought Michael and I would make a good couple.”

Rob furrowed his brow and looked at me, “I hope you're kidding,” he said seriously. I shook my head “no” and asked him to continue.

“We'll get back to you and Michael later.” After looking at his notes, he continued. “The next heir to Montclair was Ned Lacey, Beth's father. After university, Ned went to the States and met Beth's mother, Sarah Bolton, at the races at Saratoga where
she was spending the summer. Sarah was an expert horsewoman, and Ned was quoted as saying, 'I married her because she had the best seat of any woman I ever knew,' which translates today as 'she had a nice ass.'”

I rolled my eyes and hoped Mrs. Dawkins wasn't close enough to hear him.

“Beth's father was the head of a brokerage house in London,” Rob continued. “Jack said not to make too much of Edward Lacey being a broker. It seems that Andrew didn't like to entertain, so that became his son's responsibility. Although Ned hosted shooting parties, he didn't care all that much for shooting. He liked speed, as in racing motor cars, and owned an interest in several. He also owned a Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, which Jack worked on. During the war, Jack drove an ambulance donated by Rolls Royce. Since he had already worked on a Rolls engine, it probably saved him from being assigned to the infantry.”

All of this was very interesting, but after being gone for more than four hours, was that all he had learned?

“No, there's a lot more, but it's mostly about the war. Do you really want to hear about it?” I could tell by the change in Rob's voice I probably didn't want to hear anything else.

“No, not now.” I wanted to think of it as being Christmas 1914 with Beth playing the piano while her family and all the servants sang carols. It was to be their last Christmas together.

Putting his arm around my shoulders, Rob pulled me close to him and asked, “Now, what's the deal with Michael Crowell?”

THE WEATHER WAS BEAUTIFUL now that spring had arrived. Rob and I could open the window in his tiny flat, and when there was a breeze, the room was almost bearable. I wanted to talk about something that didn't involve my returning to Minooka or Rob's going to Atlanta. I asked what else Jack had said at the Engineer's Club, and he told me about how Jack and Beth had first gotten together. It would be interesting to hear the story from Jack's point of view.

“This is what Jack said happened. 'I was walking home from the train station after finishing a term at The Tech, and Beth was out riding. Now, Beth and I had been flirting with each other for a while, but when she saw me that day, she jumped off her horse, ran up to me, and threw her arms around my neck. Naturally, I kissed her. This is the hard part to believe; I pushed off on her. This is 1913. It was not possible for the son of a butler, no matter how respected, to have any kind of a relationship with someone of Beth's class.' Jack said he was more afraid of his father finding out than the Laceys. 'My dad would have thrown me off the property. I've no doubt of it.'

“Jack knew he had hurt Beth's feelings, but he wasn't going to embarrass himself by chasing after a girl who was beyond his reach. He tried to get out of being Reed and Beth's chauffeur for that 1913 motor tour, but Lady Lacey told him, 'I wasn't really asking, Jack. The children want to do this, and they can't if they don't have an experienced driver and mechanic.' He said he never felt more like a servant than he did at that moment. He also said, 'That was an example of how the household worked. You did what you were told, when you were told, but it was always put to you in a nice way.'”

While I was listening to Rob, I had been standing near the window in my slip, and he started singing “You Can't Say No to a Soldier.” “But I can say 'no' to a civilian. Can we get back to the story?” Did all men think this much about sex?

“After a rough start, they had a blast on that trip. When they finally found the Edwards/Garrison farm, they were sitting in the car just laughing their heads off. Mrs. Edwards came out and asked what they were doing in her drive laughing like school children. Beth explained that they were looking for her ancestors—the ones Jane Austen wrote about in
Pride and Prejudice
, and Mrs. Edwards said, 'Oh, Lord, not another one.' Seems other people had figured it out, too.

“When Beth told Mrs. Edwards she was a blood relation of the Garrisons, she invited them in for tea and said that she had 'never owned to it before. You read that book and you'd think running a farm was like going on a picnic. We work from dawn to dusk here. And Lucy! The one Jane Austen called Lydia. Do you think my husband wants to admit that his great, great, however many greats, had knowledge of a man before they were married?' After lunch, Mrs. Edwards told them to go up to the
attic and take whatever they wanted, and they packed up a ton of stuff.”

“That was 1913. They didn't get married until 1916. What happened in between?” I asked.

“After the car trip, Jack told Beth that things had to go back to the way they were before the trip because it would have been a disaster for both of them if they were found out. The next summer, Jack was working on a school project in the Highlands, and Beth was back on the marriage circuit. By the end of the 1914 season, Beth's suitors had been narrowed to Ginger Bramfield and Colin Matheson, the Irish guy. Because Beth and Ginger had been friends since they were kids, Jack couldn't see Beth marrying him. He figured she'd end up with Matheson.

“When the war started in 1914, Jack realized if it went on for any length of time he would end up in the Army. He saw it as a way to get away from Montclair and Beth because he was convinced her engagement to Matheson would be announced at Christmas, and it was.”

My jaw dropped. At no time, in our many conversations about the obstacles that she and Jack had faced, did Beth mention she had been involved with anyone other than Jack. “What happened? Did she call it off? I wonder if he got killed?”

“Jack didn't say another word about it, but it accounts for all of those missing months. But if Matheson was in the Army, and it's almost guaranteed that he was, then he may have gotten killed. Obviously, we're now into the war years, and with the exception of their marriage, nothing good happened.” Looking at me, he said, “Do you want to hear it anyway?”

I nodded. “I care so much about them now that I have to know what happened.”

“All right then. The war broke out in August 1914, and in September, some general raised a battalion of London stockbrokers, and Trevor volunteered and ended up serving in the Royal Fusiliers. While he was in training, the regular British army was nearly destroyed in Belgium. From that point on, most of the men who fought on the Western Front were raw recruits who were rushed in to fill the depleted ranks of the professional soldiers. Trevor was wounded at Loos in September 1915. His sergeant got him back behind the British lines, but he died at a clearing station.” With a grim face, Rob said, “The British used gas at Loos, but it blew back on their own troops. There is the possibility Trevor was gassed by his own guys.

“When the telegram arrived at Montclair, Mrs. Crowell sent for Jack, who was at school in Manchester, and had him go out to Cambridge. So it was Jack who told Beth that her brother had been killed. He said it was one of the saddest moments of his life. When she came into the visitors' room and saw him, she looked as happy as he'd ever seen her. But then she asked him what he was doing there. Jack said, 'I didn't say anything, but she knew, and the tears just poured out of her.'

“Jack and Beth went to the camp where Matt was training and said Matt wasn't surprised because word had reached the camp of the disaster at Loos. Sir Edward went down to Henley and took Reed out of school, and that was the end of his education. Jack said that was a big mistake. If he had stayed at Henley, Reed probably wouldn't have been called up. But he didn't explain how that would have kept him out of the Army seeing how he was old enough to fight.

“Matt's leadership abilities were obvious from the start, and he was quickly promoted to captain. Tom Crowell served under
him, and because Tom and Matt were so close, Jack assumed that Matt would want his brother for his assistant, what the Brits call a batman. But Matt told Jack, 'I've never treated your brother as a servant, and I'm not going to start now.'

“Matt wanted his men to have every advantage possible, so he kept after them to stay in shape and did lots of inspections. He had his men scrounge around farms and villages looking for better food, which he paid for out of his own pocket. Matt was mentioned in dispatches to headquarters, which in the British Army is an official commendation for an act of bravery. It sounds like the guy was a born leader, and he had guts.

“Jack said that people have a misconception about the war, thinking the men were in frontline trenches all of the time. The way it worked was the troops were rotated from the first line of trenches to reserve trenches. After that, they went to the rear for light duty so they could rest up and get ready mentally and physically for the next push. They played football and had cricket matches and went into nearby villages for dinner. In Jack's case, he'd sneak in a visit with Beth.

“The Laceys received conflicting stories about how Matt was killed. Jack thinks he went over the top, was killed by a machine gun, but his body could not be recovered immediately. If it was lying out there in No Man's Land, it probably was hit by artillery shells and blown to bits. This created all kinds of problems for his mother because she got it in her head that Matt had been taken prisoner. But when the Laceys got a letter from the Red Cross, saying they had eyewitness accounts that Matt had in fact been killed, Lady Lacey went into such a deep depression that Sir Edward talked her into going to a sanitarium for a rest. Jack's positive Reed's depression was inherited from his mother.

“Tom Crowell died on July 1, 1916, and is buried at the Heilly Station British Cemetery. He was one of 20,000 killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. They went over the top and were mowed down by machine guns. Jack said very little about his brother. He was able to talk about Beth's brothers, but when it came to Tom, he just couldn't do it.

“As for Jack, when the war first broke out, so many men signed up that there was a shortage of skilled workmen. They had to cull the ranks for coal miners, steel workers, engineers, and other highly skilled workers. When Jack went before the registration board, they told him to stay in school because there would be a need for more engineers and mechanics down the line. At The Tech, he and the other engineering students had to practice digging frontline trenches, and the officials invited civilians to go through them so they could get the feel for what 'the boys' were experiencing in France and Belgium, which, of course, was total b.s. because the Tommies were living in filth with rats running everywhere because there was so much death. In January 1916, Jack was called up, and after he had finished his basic training, they got married, and Beth's parents never found out. When Jack went home on leave in 1919, Beth told her mother she was going to marry Jack, and Lady Lacey didn't object. Jack and his brother used to call her the dragon lady, but with all that happened during the war, the fire had gone out of her. Another reason why Lady Lacey didn't pitch a fit was because so many of the men who would have been Beth's suitors had been killed. Those guys tended to go into the Army as line officers, and their casualty rate was disproportionately high. It was Jack's father who had fits.

“This is what Jack told me. 'You have to keep in mind that my father referred to the Laceys as 'our betters.' Servants
were downstairs; our betters were upstairs. My father was an intelligent, capable man, but that was his view of the world until the day he died. My mother and Beth had a good relationship, but until the very end of his life, my father just could not relax around Beth. He never addressed her by her name because he didn't know what to call her.'

“Jack and Beth were married at the church in Crofton like it was the first time, but Jack wasn't home for good yet. In France, he was assigned to a Graves Consolidation team. They had to disinter bodies that were scattered all over Northern France and rebury them in these large military cemeteries. If possible, the consolidation team marked the grave for the graves registration team, but a lot of them ended up with headstones that said 'Known Unto God,' including, possibly, Matt Lacey. It was worse than any job he had during the war. He said, 'When you're in war, you know shit's coming down the pike, and you're prepared for it. But once the guns go silent, you come out of that hard shell that's been protecting you. I had terrible nightmares the whole time I was assigned to Graves Consolidation.'

“To be closer to Jack, Beth worked in a French hospital. She spoke French like a native, and they needed all the nurses they could get since the French took even more casualties than the British. After the war, Jack went on to receive his master's degree in engineering, and in the early '20s, he took a job in India building railroad bridges. He was very complimentary about Beth and how she adapted to wherever they were living, especially considering how she was brought up at Montclair. Everything Jack told me was voluntary,” Rob said. “I asked him questions about his career, but anything personal, he told me without me asking.”