to acknowledge. Its location, with its long back garden backing onto the river and its frontage onto the small square, gave it an almost country feel, and its interior decoration showed not only good taste and a respect for maintaining period detail but a thorough awareness of the needs of modern life as well.
Her mother had been extremely impressed with the kitchen and bathroom when she and Mollie’s father had driven down to Fordcaster with Mollie to help her get settled in.
‘It’s got a proper oven and not just a microwave,’ her mother had approved. ‘And everywhere’s so clean.’
‘Mmm... Apparently, according to Bob Fleury, the landlord is very particular about that sort of thing, and about who he takes on as tenants. Initially I’ve only been granted a lease for three months.’
‘Well, I can see his point,’ her mother had commented. ‘If this was my house I certainly wouldn’t want just anyone living here.’
Walking into the kitchen now, Mollie went to fill her kettle and make herself a hot drink.
Surprisingly Pat Lawson had proved to be extremely interesting to talk to, or rather to listen to, and in no time at all she had furnished Mollie not just with her great-grandmother’s much prized recipe for her famous chutney but in addition a good deal of crisply informative and very witty background information about the history of the town, including some interesting facts about its foremost family—the Villiers of St Otel—both past and present.
‘They go back right to the times of William the Conqueror,’ she had told Mollie. ‘The first earl came over from Normandy, although he wasn’t an earl then, just one of William’s knights. William gave him the earldom in return for his loyalty to him.
‘Things haven’t always been easy for them, of course. There was an earl beheaded in the time of Henry the Eighth, for supporting Anne Boleyn, and another during the Civil War; the most famous of them all, though, was probably the Black Earl—Rake-hell St Otel, they called him. He made a fortune gaming in the clubs in London and then lost it again and ended up abducting an heiress so that he could marry her for her money.
‘When, after six unsuccessful attempts to present him with an heir, his countess finally gave birth to a much wanted son there was a rumour abroad that her child had been another girl and that she had been exchanged at birth for a boy child fathered on one of the serving wenches by her husband...’
Pat Lawson shook her head at this point, but Mollie was more interested in learning about the vices of the current Earl rather than his long-dead ancestor.
‘What about the present Earl?’ she pressed her, eager to gather ammunition against her adversary.
‘Alex?’ Pat responded, with an affectionate warmth and an easy familiarity which both surprised and displeased Mollie somewhat, causing her to scowl horribly and Pat to break off from what she had been about to say and enquire, ‘Are you feeling quite well...?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine,’ Mollie assured her hastily. ‘Please go on. You were saying about Alex...about the Earl...’
Had Pat heard the angry note of censure and dislike in her voice as she’d said the word ‘Earl’? Mollie shot the older woman a quick look. There was no point in alienating her by allowing her own feelings about the man to show, not when it was obvious both from Pat’s doting tone of voice and the indulgent look on her face that she held a vastly different opinion of him.
‘Oh, yes, Alex... He’s had a hard time of it; there’s no doubt about that.’
She paused whilst Mollie attempted to look duly sympathetic, although inwardly she was silently raging. ‘A hard time of it’. Not from what she had seen, he hadn’t. Oh, yes, she could really buy into that one.
‘His father was killed hunting—which is one of the reasons that Alex has banned it on his land—and his unexpected death left Alex with huge death duties to pay. Luckily he’s managed to keep most of the land, even if he’s had to cut down on staff.’
‘I’ve read that more and more farmers and farmworkers are leaving the land,’ Mollie commented.
An idea was beginning to take shape in her mind, the seeds of what she knew in her bones would make a truly controversial piece starting to germinate in the warm, receptive atmosphere of her own instinctive sympathy for the underdog and her equally instinctive dislike of Alexander, Earl of St Otel, and all that he stood for.
‘Yes. Yes, some are.’ Pat was agreeing sombrely with her. ‘We’ve all had so many problems to face recently with there being so many food scares and new EC laws are coming into force.’
‘I was thinking more specifically of the problems that occur when farmers and farmworkers who have devoted the whole of their working lives to their farms discover, when they come to retire, that they are expected to vacate properties which have probably been their homes for most of their lives. Tenanted farms and tied cottages...’
‘Oh, yes, problems can and do occur,’ Pat agreed readily. ‘Often with tragic results.’
‘Like the woman in the north of England who was evicted from the home she had lived in all her life after her husband’s death, and expected to adapt to city life, living in a high-rise council block at eighty-two years of age,’ Mollie supplemented for her, really beginning to warm to her theme. This was an area she had researched extensively as a student, and such injustices were very close to her heart.
‘Yes, the law can be very unfair,’ Pat acknowledged.
‘Not the law, the landlords who implement it,’ Mollie corrected her firmly. ‘I know that the Earl is your landlord. I expect he owns a great deal of property, both locally and elsewhere.’
‘Yes. Yes, he does, but...’
Mollie could see the headline now, hear the plaudits ringing in her ears as she exposed Alexander, Earl of St Otel, for the selfish, greedy monster that he undoubtedly was. Heavens, such a story might even attract the interest of a television documentary team, and then...
Not that she would ever write a single word motivated by self-interest, she told herself sternly. That simply wasn’t her style. No, what she wanted to do was to draw people’s attention to social injustices, to right wrongs, to slay dragons, and if one of those dragons should just happen to be the Earl of St Otel, then...then that only went to prove how right she had been to...to... Well, anyway, he had had no right to kiss her like that.
Thanking Pat for her time, she hurried back to the Gazette’s offices, where she diligently produced an article including the recipe for Pat’s great-grandmother’s famous chutney. But once she left work and got home she looked out her earlier research and seated herself in front of her own computer, where she set to work producing a far more controversial and explosive piece.
It was an exposé of the way wealthy and uncaring land-owners treated their employees, and although she was scrupulously careful about not naming the Earl of St Otel—after all, she had nothing concrete in evidence against him yet—it was him Mollie had in mind as she worked on her article. He was, she had decided, the epitome of the greedy and uncaring land-owner, and a man too proud and arrogant, too selfish, to have a thought in his head for anyone other than himself.
Writing the article was one thing, she admitted, getting Bob Fleury to print it was quite another, but somehow she would find a way. She was determined. What she had to say, what she had to reveal and unmask about
