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It turned out to be the correct move. In 1807, Mr. Chatterton, Charlotte, and Mary moved to Canterbury. They had been living in rooms near the Charter House for fifteen years when Mr. Chatterton died suddenly. With his death, the Garrison estate was entailed away from Charlotte because of her sex, and Charlotte and Mary chose to return to Hertfordshire.

I had been reading this letter aloud to Rob when he stopped me. “How does Beth know all this? She’s stopped saying this information came through Aunt Margie. She must be related to the Laceys.” I nodded and continued.

After her mother’s death, Anne Desmet moved to Bath. The city was in its heyday at this time, and she leased a house in a neighbourhood near to the famous Royal Crescent. She brought with her the butler and her nurse, Mrs. Jackson, whom Anne was devoted to, and who spent a good portion of her life caring for Anne. We know she attended concerts and assemblies in Bath, escorted by her cousin, Col. Alexander Devereaux (Col. Fitzwilliam). Col. Devereaux was wounded at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and after his release from the Army, he went to live with Anne in Bath. The colonel died in 1819. Anne lived another three years.

I hope her years in Bath were happy ones. She certainly deserved it. Her life demonstrates that even the wealthy can be miserable if they are not nurtured and loved.

Your friend,

Beth

After finishing the letter, I told Rob about the conversation Jack and I had during our drive to Pamela’s house. He mentioned that the Laceys had three sons and a daughter, and in Beth’s letter recounting her Christmas visit to Harrods, she mentioned her brothers. “I’m positive the daughter is Beth Crowell.”

“Why the big secret?” Rob asked.

“I don’t know. But there must be something hurtful in this story for her to keep up this pretense.” I wouldn’t have long to wait before I found out, because Beth and Jack were coming to London.

❋❋❋

Shortly after receiving the letter regarding Mary, Charlotte, and Anne, the Crowells wrote to let me know they would be visiting London and hoped we could get together for dinner at the Savoy, so they could meet my gentleman friend.

After we were seated in a gorgeous dining room, Beth told us that Jack and she frequently ate out when they moved to London during the winter of 1946–47. “Queuing up for food is unpleasant at the best of times, but with arctic temperatures day after day, I was willing to take advantage of the fact that we didn’t need ration coupons to dine in a restaurant. And don’t think I didn’t feel guilty about doing it,” she said emphatically. “Now, it’s three years since we defeated Germany, and yet we still have rationing and queuing, and people are still walking around town in drab clothes that have been patched and repatched.”

From what I had seen, patched clothing was a minor problem compared to finding enough coal for their homes. All over London, people were still pushing prams they filled up with coal at emergency dumps.

“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.