20. Alfred Dodgson ...

As it turned out the letter to Sir Alfred was not necessary.

At Emily Dodgson's request, Barclay had taken her and her daughters back to the steward's house so that she could retrieve some of her belongings. They had not been there more than a few minutes when Alfred Dodgson himself arrived, demanding to know why there was a carriage outside the house and 'who had she spoken to'?

Barclay advised him that Mrs Dodgson was under my protection and that he was in no position to make any demands. At this point Dodgson attempted to assault my man.

Barclay, as I have mentioned, is built like a prize fighter. Normally he is a very gentle man, but he also has a straight right that seems to come out of nowhere, is as fast as lightning, and has much the same impact as being struck by a very large boulder. Alfred Dodgson, in his state of rage, walked straight onto the end of it, ending on the floor unconscious.

Barclay said that the house erupted in pandemonium. The little girls began to cry at seeing their father floored that way; Emily Dodgson, torn between her affection for Alfred and her relief that he had been stopped, broke down, and generally, he said, it was a bedlam.

Whilst Barclay was coping with that, Hopley drove the carriage straight back to Rogeringham Hall to fetch me.

Helena, Charlotte, Caroline and I all went directly to the Dodgson house. Henry followed with three or four of the grooms.

Whilst I supervised the confinement of Mr Dodgson in a small outhouse, and sent one of the grooms to Sir Arthur to update him on the development; Helena and my sisters sat with Mrs Dodgson and her daughters. Henry had the Dodgson's maid servant brew tea and then we left the women in the small sitting room, while Barclay and I searched through the papers in Dodgson's desk.

While most of the papers there related to the everyday matters of the estate, there were three title deeds which baffled me at first. They were for properties that appeared to have been part of the Rogeringham estate, but now were not.

An estate like Rogeringham owns many properties, some are tied accommodation for workers, like Dodgson's house, others are leased to tenants. However, these three farms - quite substantial properties at that - appeared to have been transferred at some point to Dodgson himself and leased to new tenants. Transfers and changes in leases are all normal parts of the working of an estate, when conducted with the knowledge of the house, previously that would have been my father, and now it would be me. However, all three of these transfers were dated after my father died and before my arrival home.

In one simple and quite unlawful move, Alfred Dodgson had become a wealthy man.

It was a clever ploy. Only a full accounting of the Rogeringham estate based on the previous year would have revealed the changes that had been made. That full accounting would only have been done with the assistance of the steward, so it is possible that he could have kept this invisible by obfuscating the accounting. By leasing the properties, instead of occupying them, he could have profited greatly, possibly for the rest of his life. His efforts to conceal this, however, were clumsy, the obvious disparity in some of the rents, the inept business with the wines and his whole execution was so inept, that he failed right from the start.

Sir Arthur and his constables would arrive in a couple of hours and Dodgson would be removed to Buckingham Gaol, but still I had two major questions. How had Dodgson come up with this scheme and how had my father employed someone so inept in such an important role?

He wasn't talking however, and sat there scowling at me. It would not be considered to be out of order for either myself or Barclay to beat the answers out of him, but although we discussed it, I decided that, though he fully deserved it, I could not justify it to myself, because his children were close by.

I walked through and looked into the sitting room. It appeared chaotic, but upon further examination I realised that my mother and Emily Dodgson were talking animatedly as if they had known each other many years. My sisters were engaging the Dodgson girls and there was much giggling and laughing between them. It struck me that it would be good for them not to spend the night under this roof after the events earlier. I suggested removing everyone to the hall.

I despatched one of the grooms back to the hall, requesting the brougham and instructing Mrs Ellis to prepare rooms for Mrs Dodgson and her daughters, for a few days. I gathered all of the papers I could see from Dodgson's desk and placed them in a satchel-bag.

The children and my sisters were packed into the brougham and sent off to Rogeringham Hall.

Barclay rode up next to the coachman and Emily Dodgson and my mother rode in the smaller carriage back to the house. Hopley would return for me as soon as he could.

I waited for Sir Arthur and his men, reading through the papers. I was no closer to understanding the puzzle, when the Justice arrived. I told him what had happened and wrote it all down for him, signing it in his presence.

It was as the constables were moving Dodgson out of the shed, that he struck one of them in the face with his fore-head and took off towards the nearby copse of trees at a rate of knots.

There was shouting, calling for him to stop, which he didn't, and then a musket shot, deafeningly close to me, rang out in the gathering gloom of the afternoon.

Normally, at the - surprising - speed with which Dodgson ran, in the poor light, I would have expected him to make the gloom, and cover of the woodland, but whether by bad luck or by ill-judgement, Dodgson made a swerve to one side - in an attempt to avoid the ball. He tripped and fell, tumbling and striking his head against a stump. By the time we reached his body, Alfred Dodgson, steward of the Rogeringham estate, was dead.