Sight Unseen

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 u

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 co

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.

But it was a stretch, as Umber well knew. He walked out of Kew Gardens station that afternoon into the heart of a Victorian suburb that had not existed when Mary Croft wrote a letter to her sister in October 1791. His own previous trips to Kew had either been to tour the Gardens or to visit the National Archives, which had been massively and modernistically extended since 1981, to judge by his glimpse of the riverside complex from the train. Two hundred years previously, documents now stored at meticulously maintained levels of temperature and humidity would have been mouldering in a Chancery Lane cellar. Such was the scale of all the changes through which Umber knew it was fanciful to suppose he could somehow thread a path.

He wandered into a bookshop that caught his eye as soon as he left the station and bought a pocket history of the area: The Story of Kew. He leafed through it over a cup of coffee in a cafe a few doors along, lingering on the chapters devoted to the Georgian period. The account of the origins of the Botanical Gardens held no surprises. Nor did much of what followed concerning the persistent rumour that George III, while still Prince of Wales, had secretly married a Quakeress called Ha

Then, as Umber turned the page, a name leapt out at him from the print. Dr James Wilmot was the clergyman supposed to have solemnized the marriage. And Dr James Wilmot was on the long-list of Junian candidates. There was a co

It was a frail one, however. As far as Umber could recall, Wilmot was never a serious contender, his candidature resting on airy claims made by a niece after his death. What Umber could not recall was any suggestion of a link between Wilmot and the Chesterfield-Dayrolles clan. Besides, Wilmot had never been Vicar of Kew, no matter what marriage ceremonies he may have conducted there. He could not have been the friend of Christabella Dayrolles referred to in Mary Croft's letter.

Umber left the cafe and headed towards Kew Green. A map of 1800 reproduced in The Story of Kew showed the whole area east of the Gardens as fields. There were only two small areas of housing: one centred on the Green, at the northern end of the Gardens, the other lining the opposite bank of the Thames either side of Kew Bridge. Logically, Christabella's friend had to have lived in one of these locations.

It could not have been the Green. Umber sensed rather than deduced this as he prowled across it, sca

Umber crossed Kew Bridge and turned right along Strand-on-the-Green, a riverside path ru