Ah yes. The amanuenses. They were the point Umber's researches had arrived at towards the end of the Trinity term of 1981. And there was what he was looking for, in a clutch of papers labelled Christabella Dayrolles. He sifted eagerly through them, in search of the notes he knew he must have made during his inspection of the Ventry Papers, likely repository of any clue that Christabella Dayrolles had written the letters at Junius's dictation.
But Umber had forgotten less than he thought. He had evidently examined everything there was to be examined on the uncelebrated doings of the wife of Lord Chesterfield's friend, godson and confidant, Solomon Dayrolles. The truth was that this amounted to very little. Christabella Dayrolles had stubbornly refused to emerge from her husband's shadow. If she was Junius's amanuensis, he had clearly chosen wisely. Her discretion alone had survived her.
As for the Ventry Papers, there was the briefest of notes, written by Umber, it seemed to his older self, in a mood of some exasperation. Staffs Record Office, 16/7/81. Ventry Papers. Tedious screeds of estate correspondence. Family refs almost all to Ventry side. Prob a dead end, but worth checking Kew ref in sister's letter to Mrs V of 19 Oct 1791.
What was the Kew reference? The note did not say. It had not needed to, of course. Umber had intended to follow it up long before there was any danger of forgetting it. But eleven days after his visit to the Staffordshire Record Office, something had happened to put such matters out of his mind. Which is where they had remained. Until now.
The choice had been made for him. He had to go to Stafford and nail down the reference. It might be a waste of precious time, but he could not know that without going. He had intended to go before now and been sidetracked. He was not about to let himself be sidetracked again. Waldron had probably glanced at the contents of the box and decided he could safely ignore them. It would be good to prove him wrong.
In attempting to do so, Umber was also trying to prove himself right. Junius was unfinished business in more ways than one. His instinct was to pursue the Ventry lead to the finish. Too often in the past he had failed to follow his instincts. This time would be different. It had to be.
He caught an early enough train from Euston next morning to be in Stafford by nine o'clock, booking a second night at the Travel Inn before he left. Lack of sleep caught up with him disastrously somewhere around Watford, however. He did not wake until the train was pulling into Crewe, the stop after Stafford, two hours later. He then had to wait another hour for a train back to Stafford and did not arrive at the County Records Office until gone eleven o'clock.
It was an infuriatingly bad start. But the staff at
the Record Office were soothingly efficient. The Ventry Papers were in his hands within half an hour.
They had been bound in several marbled leather volumes by a Ventry of the Edwardian period, who had added a comprehensive table of contents. Umber steered a straight course through boundary disputes, rent-rolls and local Hunt politics to the letter of 19 October 1791.
It was written by Christabella Ventry's younger sister, Mary Croft, from her home in London. She dwelt on family affairs that would be known to both parties: cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws. There were several references to their 'dear departed mother' (Christabella Dayrolles), who had died two months previously. And then came the reference to Kew.
The depth of feeling expressed by so many since Mother's passing is a testament to the nobility and generosity of her character. I was more affected than I can say to receive a letter this week past from her dear and troubled friend at Kew, who confesses himself sorely afflicted by the loss of her counsel and acquaintanceship.
That was it. There was nothing else. A friend at Kew, known to both daughters. It amounted to hardly anything. Yet there was just enough, in the description of the friend as 'dear and troubled', in the mention of their mother's role as his adviser, in the faintly suspicious way that Mary Croft avoided naming him, to draw Umber in.
There was no quick or easy way to follow it up, however. Umber admitted as much to himself as he sat aboard the lunchtime train back to London. That was probably why he had made no immediate attempt to do so in July 1981. An unnamed man living in Kew two centuries before was effectively untraceable. Logically, Umber would have to search for him by indirect routes – exploring any connections with Kew, however apparently tenuous, that he could find in the affairs of Lord Chesterfield and Solomon Dayrolles.
But such researches could last for weeks, if not months. Umber had two days, not even enough time to scratch the surface. It was, quite simply, a hopeless task.
A powerful sense of that hopelessness clung to Umber when he got off the train at Euston. He did not know what to do or where to go. He had very little time to act in. And no idea what action he should take. Largely by inertia, it seemed to him, he drifted down into the Underground station. And there he bought a ticket to Kew.
On the Tube, Umber tried to apply his mind to the problem like the historian he had once been. What did he know about eighteenth-century Kew? Not much. But not nothing either.
It was a place with royal connections. George II, when still Prince of Wales, lived at Richmond Lodge, which he retained when he became king. His son Frederick, the next Prince of Wales, settled with his wife Augusta at Kew House, just to the north. After Frederick's death in 1751, Princess Augusta pursued his ambition to transform the estate into the famous botanical gardens. Frederick's son, the future George III, grew up at Kew under the combined influence of his widowed mother and her trusted adviser, the Earl of Bute. Junius reserved a particular venom for both parties, insinuating that they were lovers and cruelly relishing the news when it came of Augusta's fatal throat cancer.
It had not occurred to Umber until now that Junius's loathing of Augusta and Bute might have been heightened by their being, as it were, his neighbours. His knowledge (and disapproval) of George Ill's upbringing could then be seen, if the point was stretched, as the fruit of personal experience.