Thyme II Thyme (10 page)

'Well, tomorrow you can focus all you want,' Anne-Marie said, rising. 'But for now, we'll get you into something more comfortable and I'll drive us all back. Then in the morning, dear Andrea here can do us the biggest fry up in history and sod our waistlines.'

I slept alone for what remained of the night and well into the following morning, waking only when the smell of bacon frying penetrated the jumble of my dreams through the half open bedroom door. I sat up, shook my head to clear it and swung my legs over the side of the bed knowing I needed the toilet before anything else. I stopped only to snatch up a terry cloth robe that was hanging over the back of the bedside chair.

Downstairs, still heavy-eyed and clad only in the borrowed robe, I found Anne-Marie about to pour coffee and Andrea, neat and precise in a white mini dress and opaque white stockings, turning bacon and sausages in one giant pan while several eggs sizzled in another hardly less impressive skillet.

'Hungry?' Anne-Marie asked, tipping hot liquid into the first of three mugs.

I nodded, pulled out a chair from beneath the kitchen table and eased myself down onto it. 'Starving,' I confessed, my mouth watering. 'I feel like I could eat a horse.'

'Well, we've got the best part of half a pig over here,' Andrea said cheerfully, 'but no horses, I'm afraid, so you'll have to make do. Baked beans and mushrooms okay for you?'

It really was a dietician's horror of a breakfast, complete with buttered toast, fried bread and even fried tomatoes, the whole laid out on plates that were huge in comparison with anything we'd ever had at home. But within minutes the feast had been devoured, leaving only greasy traces and not a guilty expression in sight.

'That's the way to start a day,' Anne-Marie sighed, and reached to replenish the coffee mugs. 'So,' she continued as we added our individual sugar and milk quotas, 'what's on the agenda for today?'

'I'm really not sure,' I confessed. The fry-up and coffee had brought me fully awake but I had no more idea of where I should try to go next than I'd had the previous evening. 'Like I said, we've found no Hacklebury references to do with large estates, so there has to be a reason for that, and perhaps that's where we should try to start.'

'Except we don't have the name of the estate, nor even where it was,' Andrea pointed out. 'Don't you have any idea at all, Teenie?'

I shook my head. 'I had the feeling that it had to be in the south of England, quite possibly in either Hampshire or one of the adjoining counties, but I never saw anything much that would offer a real clue and it could just as easily have been somewhere up north. It was fairly warm, but then it was summer and even Yorkshire has warm days in summer. It's not all Bleak House and snow drifts, you know.'

'Well, given that my family Hacklebury connections are all in Dorset,' Anne-Marie said, 'then I reckon it would be reasonable to assume that your first guess is fairly close to the truth. Whether it was a Hacklebury who owned this place or not, we should start with the estate itself and work backwards from there. It's a shame you didn't think to try to get something more out of that lot while you were back there. Even a village name might have been a start.'

'I did have other things on my mind,' I pointed out just a little too tersely, 'and half the time I wasn't able to speak, even if I'd thought of it.'

'No, of course not,' she replied quickly. 'But it might be worth trying to keep that in mind for next time... always supposing there
is
a next time, of course.'

'Oh, there will be,' I said, and somehow I knew, with an unshakeable conviction I could not explain, that my time-travelling adventures had only just begun.

4.

Quite what I hoped to gain from identifying the true position I had fallen into at the Hacklebury estate I was not quite sure, except that I had always been brought up to believe knowledge means power and the next time I came face-to-face with Gregory and his mad henchwoman I would need every scrap of power I could muster.

Besides, I reasoned as we drove along the coast road towards Dorchester, if I could identify the estate I might also be able to discover why it was that Hacklebury's name was no longer to be found anywhere in association with any large area of property. In this fact I felt sure lay at least part of the key to all this. The longer I thought about it, the more positive I grew that the land had probably never been rightfully his in the first place and that he had usurped the title to it as surely as he had usurped poor little Angelina's dowry along with everything else that should rightfully have been hers.

Gregory Hacklebury, I was now convinced, was a form of Victorian land pirate, totally unscrupulous and completely without any human principle or compassion, but still weak enough to be manipulated by a female psychopath whose hunger for wealth and position was probably fiercer even than his own. Meg was the true mistress of the estate, as I should have seen from the beginning, her maid routine and public obsequiousness no more than a sham, and even Gregory knew that, I now suspected, though for some reason or other he found himself unable to break free of her spell.

'It's almost like she was a witch,' I muttered as we crossed the county border into Dorset and began climbing a hill from which the view out over the English Channel was as spectacular as it was peaceful under the surprising winter sun. 'She was definitely the boss in that set-up.'

'Yes, only presumably Hacklebury assumed she was his faithful hound in much the same way as she tried to turn you into her obedient little dog girl,' Anne-Marie sounded distracted; she was squinting against the glare from the chalky deposits that covered the asphalt road here.

'Yet every dog must have its day,' I murmured, repeating the thought I'd had some one-hundred-and-thirty years back in time. 'Only a sensible dog doesn't bite the hand that feeds it, not until...' I slapped the dashboard with such violence that Anne-Marie swerved sharply towards the centre of the road. It was lucky there were no vehicles approaching in the opposite direction or my enthusiasm might have ended our quest right there and then.

'What the—?' she gasped.

'That's it!' I cried. 'Um, sorry,' I muttered as an afterthought. 'But that's the answer, the reason why Greg's name isn't down on any title deeds we've been able to find. The land was never truly his and he never succeeded in getting it, not legally or any other way.'

'You mean—?' Andrea began from the backseat.

'Meg! Yes!
She
got it all in the end.'

'And what happened to Hacklebury?' Anne-Marie asked, half turning her head towards me while concentrating on the road.

I shrugged. 'Who the hell knows?'

'Or cares?' Andrea added.

'It might explain a lot, certainly,' Anne-Marie conceded. 'But unless I'm mistaken, we don't happen to know anything much about this Meg, aside from the fact that she was a psycho.'

'And a hell of a lot cleverer than Hacklebury, who seems to have done most of his thinking with his penis,' I said. 'Like most men, as it happens.' There was a slight cough from behind us. 'Present company excepted,' I added, turning to look at the demure female figure sitting with her long legs elegantly crossed and her dark Cleopatra-style wig as immaculate as a coiffure could ever hope to be. 'Besides,' I added, grinning, 'I thought you were in girl mode today?'

'I am,' Andrea pouted, 'but a girl has to defend her roots.'

'Huh,' Anne-Marie snorted, 'I always
dye
mine.'

'Let's get back to Meg,' I suggested. When I get an idea I like to pursue it hard and fast and this was a good strong line to follow.

'She never mentioned a surname, I suppose?' Anne-Marie prompted.

I shook my head. 'If she did, and I'm pretty certain she didn't, then it went straight past me.'

'Then we're not that much further on, are we?' Andrea observed.

Anne-Marie was far more positive. 'I think we could be,' she said encouragingly. 'Before we were chasing Hackleburys and now we're coming down here to chase suitable sized estates, only right up until a few moments ago we had nothing to help us decide which estate might be the right estate, given that we already know there were no large properties registered to a Hacklebury of any description.'

'So, we just go over all the old maps and records for Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon, and the whole of the south of England while we're at it?' Andrea made no attempt to hide the sarcasm in her voice.

I held up a hand. 'No, wait a bit,' I said, screwing my face up in an effort to concentrate. 'Let me think a moment... maybe we can narrow it down after all.'

'Take your time, sweetie.' Anne-Marie stepped on the gas to overtake a crawling Morris Minor estate.

I looked sideways and pulled a face at the three young children who were pressed against the rear window and making their own variety of faces at us as we sped past. 'Meg definitely wasn't upper class and neither did she sound particularly middle class,' I began, 'but then she could have come from anywhere and it doesn't follow that she had to have been born wherever it was we were. Hacklebury could have picked her up anywhere on his travels, or vice-versa. But those other maids had to be locally born, and their accents were pretty rural, although not strong enough to be real west country. Get as far down as Devon and Somerset and the accent is really thick in the country, and I reckon it would have been thicker still back then without radio and the telly to take the edges off.'

'So, Hampshire or Dorset, you think?' Anne-Marie prompted me again.

'Yes, and not that far north in either county,' I concluded. 'Go up thirty miles and they speak as broadly as anyone from cider country.'

'Along the coast, then?'

'Maybe, but maybe again, not quite.' I nodded left towards the sea, which was perhaps half a mile away now as the road moved slightly inland. 'Open the window and take a deep breath,' I suggested.

'Smells of petrol and bird shit,' Andrea said in a most unladylike tone of voice.

'Smells of salt,' I corrected her, 'what people wrongly refer to as ozone. We all know that smell and yet, because we live near the sea, we take it for granted. Our family home is only a few hundred yards from the shore, so the smell is particularly strong there, but when the wind is in the right direction you can catch a whiff of it inland for a few miles, even at the cottage in Rowland's Castle.'

'What about seagulls?' Anne-Marie prompted again. 'We often hear them when they come inland. Did you hear any screeching up above when you were back in time?'

'No,' I replied after a moment, 'but then seagulls tend to drift inland mainly when the weather is a bit dodgy, or they sense a storm brewing, and all the time I was back there it was as flat and calm as it is today and a whole lot warmer. It was midsummer and the sea would have been like a mill pond.'

'But even so, if you'd been within a mile or two of the coast, you'd have heard something,' Anne-Marie persisted.

I conceded that she had a point, especially as it fitted in with my own recently formed and still evolving theory. 'So,' I went on, 'I reckon we need to concentrate on a corridor of land stretching east to west over... let's say fifty or sixty miles, and from a point about five miles inland to somewhere around thirty miles north of that.'

'Oh, that'll make it easy then,' Andrea piped up again.

I turned and glared at her. 'I'll do something to you that means you'll stay a bloody girl forever if you don't shut up!' I snapped. 'Just pay attention, will you? It's not going to be quite as much needle and haystack as you seem to think. After all, we're looking at an area of maybe eighteen-hundred square miles, which sounds a lot but isn't, not really, not when you consider that most of the country in the area would have been open farmland and what I saw was largely woodland, and lots of it.'

'A large wooded estate in the middle of the farm belt then,' Anne-Marie declared, nodding. 'Yes, you could be right, Teenie, and if your theory about the accents is on the money, this might take a lot less effort than we thought.'

I make no pretensions to genius, even if my intelligence level is comfortably above average, but I've always prided myself on being able to think analytically and even laterally. I'm also pretty good with cryptic crosswords and even better at them when I'm drunk, but that's beside the point here. I've also always had this ear for voices, which made me quite a good mimic during my school days, and now this dubious talent, which earned me a few detentions in my time from unimpressed teachers, finally paid off.

In the main library at Dorchester, pouring over a large map copy dated eighteen forty-five, we found three promising possibilities within minutes and a further check through musty records volumes delivered the final goods.

'
Megan Crowthorne
,' Anne-Marie read out loud. '
Registered title of Great Marlins Estate in eighteen forty-one from the previous owner, one Saul Carpenter
. Doesn't say how much she paid, if she paid anything at all.'

'Any other details about her or this Saul Carpenter?'

'Not here,' Anne-Marie said, shaking her head. 'This is just the bare on who owned what. We'll have to delve into parish records if we want more.'