Fondly,
Will
If this really was a letter from William Lacey to his cousin, Anne Desmet, then it revealed that Will’s father had a mistress, and his son was left to handle the fallout from the relationship! And what was Roger Manyard to Will Lacey? No wonder he was in such a bad mood when he attended the assembly. The letter also showed that, although Will dismissed the insult heard by Elizabeth as being of no importance, he had noticed her.
I could only guess that the reason I had been given this letter was to back up the Crowells’ claim that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy were Elizabeth Garrison and William Lacey. What I needed to know was, where did they get the letter?
Chapter 4
With so many buildings destroyed in air raids, housing in London was at a premium. A friend of a friend from my time in Germany had found a place for me to stay with her former neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Dawkins. The room I rented was a tiny bedroom sitter on the third floor of a terrace house in a workingclass neighborhood in north London. My rent included kitchen privileges if I cooked my own food or, if I chose to eat with the family, I was charged for the meals. This was necessary because an austerity program had recently been implemented, which included additional cuts in food rations.
As for bathing, I could have a bath if I gave Mrs. Dawkins enough notice so that she could turn on the hot water. There was a line drawn around the tub to indicate when the maximum allowable height of five inches had been reached — a holdover from the war. When I paid my rent, Mrs. Dawkins totaled up all of my baths and charged me extra for them. As long as I watched out for the wallpaper and carpet, Mrs. Dawkins was a fair if not the friendliest landlady.
More than two years after the war, it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of a city that had been bombed night after night during the Blitz and later with V-1 and V-2 rockets. Vacant lots where bombed-out buildings had been cleared were a common sight, especially near St. Paul’s, where only the archdeacon’s house had miraculously survived, and certain areas were cordoned off because of the instability of the buildings or unexploded bombs. There were shortages of fruit, eggs, meat, and petrol, but as an employee of the Army Exchange Service, I had access to government commodities at the Post Exchange. I shared some of the scarcer items, such as sugar, flour, tea, and coffee, as well as Spam, with Mrs. Dawkins, who doled them out to her neighbors.
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.