The Gilded Cage - Taking my Place

Smelling a Rat

"Some things are still unclear," Papa said, after his parents and I were all settled around the kitchen table again for a war summit, fortified with tea and cake. "But the things I can prove are at least suggestive of some of our other nascent theories. For instance, the fact that Richard Ellesmere owned the land Charlesfield was built on...and paid rent for, I might add...and sold it to Bridgewater Homes, where Barry Scott was a director. Market price for the sale...no issues there...but Richard inherited the land from his father, and the rent was a pittance. He sold it for close on a hundred million pounds to Bridgewater...which means that he had many reasons to want Charlesfield to close?"

"Papa...someone told me that Mr Ellesmere paid for the new buildings at Deepdene, but they only cost about thirty million pounds?" I asked, furrowing my brow as I thought the numbers through, seeing the truth. When people talked about Mr Ellesmere and Deepdene, his donations were always mentioned, because the community was grateful for his generosity. But he had not been generous at all, because he had made a seventy-million-pound profit on the deal.

"Exactly...you really are an accountant's daughter, Hermione...Richard Ellesmere made big money out of that little exchange...it would appear that his late father bought the land from the school to help Charlesfield out of a financial crisis some twenty years ago. He rented it back to them at a peppercorn rent, and Richard inherited the arrangement when his father died...the school had a long lease. It was perfectly safe, unless the Elders decided to close it?"

"So...smart business?" Malcolm Montague suggested, with a shrug of his shoulders. "Once the school entered a new crisis...this time reputational...he found a solution that made him a lot of money, but also helped the church and Deepdene. None of the Elders are unhappy with the closure of Charlesfield, because they would rather have the school here, where they can keep a proper eye on things. So, no losers there? No one would criticise him for that? We ended up with arguably a better school, located here?"

"On the face of it, yes...but I have had some people making some discreet enquiries, mainly trying to work out how Barry Scott knew Richard Ellesmere, and when they met...and that did throw up something very interesting...concerning Nicola." Papa said, which shocked me, and evidently his mother. Catriona and I exchanged glances.

"How so, Colin?" Grandmama demanded, and I sat forwards, listening intently.

"The boy who Nicola met online, via the phone I wish I had never allowed her to have...a pupil at Broadstone school, just down the road from Charlesfield, if you remember, who was really behind the party or whatever you want to call it that Nicola and her friends escaped to attend...is the son of the managing director of Bridgewater Homes..."

"The building company Dad worked for?" I gasped, as soon as I heard the name.

"Exactly, Hermione. The scandal which made it possible to close Charlesfield, and thus free up the land for sale...which made Richard Ellesmere seventy million pounds, and presumably will make Bridgewater Homes a pretty penny, not to mention getting Barry his senior position with Ellesmere...was possibly instigated by the son of someone who would benefit. We will need to have a little talk to Nicola to see how this boy made contact with her...or how she made contact with him...because that is not something we really did at the time...but I do think this looks very suspicious?"

"Are you suggesting that a combination of Mr Ellesmere and these men from Bridgewater Homes somehow caused the scandal that led to the great purge, simply in order to enable a land deal?" Grandpa sounded incredulous. But it seemed possible to me. Nicola would have been relatively easy to lead on, I reckoned, because clever as she was, she had no real experience of boys or the world outside her Kensington home and her boarding school, so she was bound to be a little naive. I knew that she had been given the phone when she started year eleven, as a reward for her excellent school report the year before. She was almost sixteen, and although Charlesfield might have dropped below the standards of the Church of Christ the Reformer, it was still a very strict, traditional all-girls school, and their girls did not get much chance to interact with the world outside. And at home with her parents, although they were liberal by Meadvale standards, Helen and Colin certainly did not let her out of their sight, even before her fall from grace. I knew exactly what she had been thinking at the time. She wanted more independence, and she did not want to stay on at Charlesfield to do her A levels. I was fairly sure that she had been asking for a mobile phone for several years, because they were allowed at Charlesfield, although the girls who had them were only allowed to use them at certain times of the day, and once she got one, I was fairly sure that she would have tried out everything she could do on it, which obviously meant social media and anything else on the internet.