Searching for Pemberley (5 page)

After a scorcher of a summer, the arrival of the cooler temperatures had everyone out and about. In Hyde Park, people were lounging in their deck chairs, boys were playing football, moms were pushing prams, and couples were walking hand in hand or lying in the grass.

This was my second autumn away from my family, and even though I was feeling homesick more often now, there were a few reasons why I wanted to stay in England. With the exception of Blenheim, Derbyshire, and a day trip to Hampton Court where Henry VIII had courted Anne Boelyn, I had seen very little of England outside of London. After traveling through the beautiful countryside on the way to Montclair, I wanted to see more. Most importantly, I did not want to go back to the town where I had grown up.

Scranton and the surrounding towns had been in decline since the end of World War I when orders for hard coal had dropped precipitously. When the miners went out on strike in 1928, many mine owners decided to close the mines permanently.
Thousands of miners found themselves without a job and without the skills to do anything else.

My father's job was secure because he worked for the city newspaper. Even though he worked in Scranton, with its sidewalks, street lamps, streetcars, and better schools, my dad chose to live in the town where he had grown up. People from Minooka were known as “Mudtowners” because of our unpaved streets. When I was a child, many families still bathed in tin tubs set up in the kitchen, and there were those, including my Grandma Shea, who continued to use outhouses with a Sears catalog for toilet paper.

Few people owned cars, and you could play tag or shoot marbles in the street, getting out of the way of the occasional huckster. In the summer, hordes of children gathered at the corner of Davis Street and Birney Avenue to play hide-and-seek or dodgeball. The older boys hung out at Walsh's candy store, waiting for the girls to walk by, or flirted with them during Tuesday Night's Devotions at St. Joseph's. It was a wonderful place to be a child as long as you steered clear of the third rail, abandoned mines, and my brother Patrick, but a terrible place to be a working adult. Despite the hardships, many were willing to put up with being underemployed or illegally employed because it was all they knew. But after being away for more than two years, I knew better.

My first letter to the Crowells was to thank them for sharing their knowledge of the Lacey family with me, but I also had a few questions for them. They had told me that Jack's Aunt Margie had found the letter from Mary Garrison to Charlotte when his aunt located the Edwards/Garrison farm, but where had they obtained the letter from Will Lacey to Anne Desmet? Jack Crowell's answers came faster than I could have ever hoped.

12 October 1947

Dear Maggie,

It was really our pleasure to have you here, as you're a delightful young lady. Before the war, I was a railroad engineer in India and Argentina. I came home in 1940 and spent my time during the war supervising crews who were repairing infrastructure damaged by German bombs. I am currently working as a consultant, but at Beth's request, I work only part time, so your interest in the Laceys is a nice diversion for me.

Since we told you some things about Lucy and Waggoner (Lydia and Wickham), we'll start there. As part of the arrangements to get Waggoner to marry Lucy, a commission in the regular army was bought for him by Will Lacey. I suspect that Waggoner had got up to his old tricks (gambling, womanizing, etc.) at his new post near Newcastle because his colonel had him transferred to another regiment that was going to North America.

Antoinette was born in 1794 (the year after the French king and queen lost their heads). Their second daughter, Marie Therese, was born about two years later and, I assume, was named after Marie Antoinette's daughter. Lucy seems to have been fascinated by the French, and at that time, the newspapers were filled with stories describing all the gory details about the Revolution. Some included graphic sketches of aristocrats being guillotined. People ate this stuff up just like people who read about grizzly murders in the tabloids do today.

When Waggoner's regiment was sent to a fort in Kingston, Ontario, Lucy returned home to Bennets End. In one of the boxes found at the Edwards/Garrison farm was a letter from
Waggoner's colonel answering a letter from Lucy. He told her that Waggoner had deserted several months earlier, that he was unable to send any money as he had personally repaid some of Waggoner's debts, and that he had no idea where her husband had gone, but if he was found, he would be brought up on charges for desertion. Lucy was now living in the worst of all worlds. She was married but had no husband.

Richard Bingham, Charles's brother, who ran the American operations, hired an agent to track down Waggoner. He was traced to Louisville, Kentucky, where he had been entertaining the locals by telling them that he was the son of an English lord. Louisville was a rough river town, and with his English accent and fine manners, Waggoner stood out. The agent found Waggoner, except that Waggoner had died a few months earlier of typhoid.

Imagine how Lucy, who was in her early twenties, must have felt. But it worked out all right. It seems that Will arranged for Jake Edwards, the son of his head tenant, to go down to the Garrison farm. He boarded with the Garrisons and, in time, asked Lucy to marry him. I think Mr. Garrison, who was getting up in years, saw this as an opportunity to have someone take over the day-to-day operations of the farm. We'll never know how Lucy felt about Jake, but they did have two sons together.

You asked about when everyone died. At this point, I will tell you that of all the characters in the book, the last one to go was Charles Bingham in 1844, when he was seventy-five. More in the next post.

Jack Crowell (with Beth looking over my shoulder)

As interesting as all this information was, the Crowells had not written one word about Will Lacey's letter to Anne Desmet telling of his first appearance in Hertfordshire where he had made such a poor first impression. I would have to ask again.

I wrote a second letter to the Crowells mentioning that Pamela, who had grown up near Montclair, had doubts about the story, and I cited all of the coincidences she had mentioned. In light of all the hardships the British were still experiencing, my search for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy seemed silly. But as a thank you for their hospitality, I put together what everyone called “care packages” and sent them some coffee, tea, and chocolate and other things Americans always seemed to give to people in war-damaged countries.

A second letter arrived the following week from Jack thanking me for my package and saying that they would be sharing the tea and coffee with their closest friends. “However, it's got to be kept a secret that we've got the chocolate. We can't risk a riot in the village.” And then Jack got after the real reason for the letter.

8 October 1947

Dear Maggie,

Don't give up on us yet. All those coincidences do look a bit dodgy, but I can explain some of them. Remember sickly Anne Desmet? Will Lacey wrote lots of letters to her.

I'll admit I can't tell you how Mr. Chatterton/Mr. Collins came to Lady Sylvia/Lady Catherine's attention for the position of minister at her parish church, but I do know
she would have insisted on her minister marrying. Since Chatterton would inherit Bennets End one day, it made sense for him to check out his cousins, and it's possible Chatterton put Charles Bingham on to Helmsley Hall/Netherfield Park when Charles was a guest at Desmet Park.

Waggoner's more of a problem. In the book, it shows that even though Will pays him off after his father's death, he shows up and makes a run at Georgiana Lacey. Will pays him off again to get him away from his sister, but Waggoner shows up in Bennets End where Will just happens to be a guest of Charles Bingham. Coincidence? Did Waggoner come to Bennets End hoping Will Lacey would give him more money in order to get rid of him? And this whole business with the young Lucy Garrison? There's something fishy about it. Of all the girls in Brighton, Waggoner singled out Lucy, a girl he knew to have no fortune of her own, but who did have a sister who was in love with Charles Bingham, Will Lacey's friend. It wasn't as if there was a lack of female entertainment for a man of Waggoner's low tastes because Brighton was a favourite haunt of prostitutes, or what the newspapers euphemistically called 'The Cyprian Corps.'

I agree with you that the world is still turned upside down because of the war, which is why diversions, such as my research, are so important. For a people who have endured so much, a return to normalcy is an essential part of the healing process.

Stay in touch and thanks so much for the Hershey bars. Beth has a real weakness for chocolate.

Jack Crowell

After reading Jack's letter, I was starting to regret my decision to decline the Crowell's invitation to return to Crofton Wood. I certainly had nothing better to do. When I left Germany, I was getting over my first serious romance. I had met Val Sostek at a dance at the USO club in Frankfurt. Val loved to jitterbug, and although I considered myself to be a pretty good dancer, I never came close to wearing out the dance floor like he did. After our relationship heated up, Val began to talk about getting married and going back to Pittsburgh to start a family. After having grown up in a coal town, the thought of raising children in an industrial city was not something I was prepared to do. Even though I cared deeply for Val, when he received his orders to return to the States, I ended the relationship.

Once in London, my co-workers tried to hook me up with other guys—Americans, British, and one Polish officer who had fought in Italy alongside the British. I quickly discovered that the British and Americans had a lot in common. Each thought a date should end in the nearest hotel room. The Polish officer was the only man I went out with more than once, but since it was his hope to return to Warsaw one day, nothing was going to come of it. From what I had seen in the newsreels, I wasn't sure if Warsaw still existed, but if it did, it was in worse shape than Frankfurt.

After thinking about what I would not be doing that weekend, going to Crofton would be a pleasant diversion. I decided to accept the Crowells' offer to return to Derbyshire.

IN LATE OCTOBER, LOADED down with cigarettes, Spam, Nescafé, Hershey bars, and Hostess cupcakes, I headed to Crofton. For the first time in a week, it was not drizzling or raining, but the weather had turned cold. My room had a radiator in it—the kind that whistled when it came on—but it was not enough to keep out the damp. The room also had a space heater that cost six pence for about thirty minutes of heat. Every night, I huddled in front of it before hopping into bed with my flannel nightgown, long underwear, bed socks, mittens, and hot water bottle.

Jack picked me up in a Jeep he had bought at a surplus auction, and I handed him a pack of Lucky Strikes, which produced a big smile. Weeks earlier, the government had banned importing tobacco from the States. “There's nothing like an American cigarette,” he said as he lit his first one.

“I got some very good news yesterday. My younger son, Michael, is coming home from Malta for a few days. The RAF is moving some squadrons back here to England, and Mike is a stowaway on one of the planes. It's only for a few days, but I
haven't seen him since James got married, and that's a year and a half now. Mike wants to surprise his mother, so he had someone from the telegraph office hand deliver the telegram to me. I can't wait to see her face.”

As we pulled into the drive, the house was in full view. Except for the Norwegian pines, all the trees had lost their leaves, and the fall flowers had been uprooted and disposed of. Beth, who was wearing jodhpurs, was waiting for us at the door.

“Come through,” she said, making way for me to pass. “I've got a pot of tea brewing. It will take the chill off.” She pointed to the chair nearest the fire, which I gladly accepted since I had not been warm in a week. “One of the hardest things to get used to once we came back to Derbyshire from Asia was the cold and damp. But in England, you keep a stiff upper lip, buy a lot of cardigans, and pretend you aren't cold, especially with the coal shortages.”

While the Crowells prepared the tea, I had a look around. This was where Beth and Jack spent most of their time. The furniture faced the fireplace and was arranged in such a way as to best hear the radio, and magazines and engineering journals were on a side table. On the far wall were four beautifully detailed sketches showing the same pastoral scene in each of the seasons with a town in the distance. It reminded me of a view I had seen from the terrace at Montclair. On the mantle was a picture of the older son, his gorgeous wife, and baby daughter on a holiday at the beach. The other picture was of a sergeant in the Royal Air Force. Michael had his mother's dark eyes and slender build but his father's black hair. He was incredibly handsome, and I wondered if he was available. I would find out soon enough.