To save time, I attempted to distill the broken-pram saga into a few brief sentences, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave out the marvelous kites or the fat-tired bicycle or the cart filled with pram parts or the Santiago-bound grandson or the paste in Harriet’s hair or a host of other details that had made my first meeting with Arthur so memorable.
The mantel clock was chiming half past ten as I approached the end of my tale, and my hopes of returning to dreamland at a reasonable hour went down the drain. I had no regrets, though. I felt as if I’d done justice to Arthur. The portrait I’d drawn for Aunt Dimity was, to my mind, more complete and more accurate than the distorted image Grant and Charles had presented to me.
“He was as nice as nice can be,” I concluded. “To Grant Tavistock and Charles Bellingham, Arthur Hargreaves is the Hermit of Hillfont Abbey, a wealthy recluse who collects art anonymously and manipulates powerful businessmen from the jealously guarded confines of his hilltop lair, but to me . . .” My voice trailed off as I envisioned Arthur as I’d first seen him, perched atop the tall stone wall, clad in his rumpled shirt and his grass-stained trousers, with the grapevine wreath encircling his head. “To me, he’s the man who heard my baby cry and ran to help her.”
Aunt Dimity didn’t respond at once. I couldn’t blame her. I’d given her a lot to think about and I wasn’t done yet.
“I wish I’d been able to get a word in edgewise this morning,” I said. “If I’d told Peggy and Sally and the others about my encounter with Arthur, I’m sure they would have changed their minds about the Hargreaves family.”
I doubt it.
“Why?” I asked.
They probably hold the Hargreaves family responsible for starting the Finch-Tillcote feud. My mother and father did.
“Did your parents know the Hargreaveses?” I asked.
Certainly not. They would have been shunned by their neighbors had they befriended a member of the Hargreaves family. My parents knew only what their parents had told them and they passed their knowledge on to me. I presume they did so to keep me from falling into the same quagmire you fell into this morning.
“What knowledge did they pass on to you?” I asked, fascinated.
Let me see . . . According to my mother, the original Hargreaveses weren’t proper aristocrats. They were parvenus who’d made their money in trade. Hillfont Abbey
“Lilian Bunting claims that it isn’t an abbey,” I put in swiftly.
She’s quite right. Hillfont Abbey was built by Arthur’s great-great-grandfather, Quentin Hargreaves, a Victorian manufacturer who wanted something to show for his hard work. Newly affluent Victorians saw it as the height of fashion to build whimsical country houses loosely based on historical models. I imagine Quentin Hargreaves equated his mythical abbey with stability and success, but the villagers referred to it as Quentin’s Folly. They thought it was outlandish and they regarded him as nothing more than an uncouth tradesman, flaunting his wealth.
“Snobs,” I muttered.
England’s class system was more rigid in those days. People at both ends of the social spectrum looked down on self-made men. If Quentin Hargreaves had built a less flamboyant home, the villagers might have warmed to him—eventually—but his faux abbey put him beyond the pale.
“Okay,” I said. “The villagers sneered at Hillfont Abbey. They probably made snippy comments about it, too, but I don’t see how a fancy house could ignite a feud between Finch and Tillcote.”
Hillfont Abbey didn’t ignite the feud. I’m simply setting the scene for what happened next.
“What happened next?” I asked reflexively.
Quentin sided with Tillcote in a dispute that arose between the two villages. My mother couldn’t recall the exact nature of the dispute, but my father believed that it had something to do with three stolen pigs. Whatever the cause, it seems certain that a dispute took place.
“Did Quentin accuse someone in Finch of stealing the pigs?” I asked.
Not directly, but the implication was there for all to see. Quentin Hargreaves wasn’t a popular figure in Finch before the dispute. Once he aligned himself with Tillcote’s notorious pig thieves, Finch turned its back on him and his family. The cart track that ran between Finch and Hillfont Abbey was allowed to deteriorate and the Hargreaves name was dropped from polite conversation.
“Whoops,” I said, wincing.
You couldn’t have known.
“What did you make of the feud when you first heard about it?” I asked. “Did you feel duty-bound to continue it?”
I didn’t hear about it all at once, Lori, as you’ve done just now. I grew up with it. It permeated the atmosphere in Finch, like a poisonous gas. Strange things don’t seem strange when one grows up with them.