One of his first steps was to interrogate Mr. Berkeley’s man Jock, who had driven with his master to Hungerford on that November day three years before. As the result of the interview, the lawyer himself made a journey to Hungerford, where he called at the parsonage and had a conversation with the vicar, enquiring particularly about his predecessors in the living. He learnt that the former rector had died in 1680 at the age of sixty-eight, leaving a grandson, his only daughter’s child, a young man of twenty-one who had just taken deacon’s orders. The grandson’s name was Rochester. Did the vicar know anything of the young man’s father? Nothing but the vaguest rumours; it was generally understood that Lucy Rochester’s husband had deserted her a few months after their marriage, and that was naturally a subject on which the family would say nothing. Was the lady still living? She had died ten years before her father. If Mr. Tape desired further details, there was one person who might gratify him if she wished: the wife of the landlord of the Bear Inn, who had been lady’s-maid to Mistress Rochester. The attorney hastened to the inn, engaged a room for the night, and took the first opportunity of having a gossip with Mrs. Pemberton, the hostess, a comely, pleasant old dame of near seventy years. She had the keenest recollection of the one romantic incident of her life. Mistress Lucy!—of course she remembered the sweet pretty creature. She had been with her in London the year before the King came back, when she was visiting her aunt. And Mr. Rochester, too—ah! such a handsome young gentleman; but a wicked deceiver, she feared. He had protected Mistress Lucy from footpads one evening: that was the beginning of it, and the end was a marriage, and a sad end it was, for Mr. Rochester went away to France three months afterwards, on some urgent business which he did not explain, and he never returned. Mrs. Rochester remained for nearly a year in London, then returned to her father at Hungerford with her infant son, a bonny boy who grew up a blessing to her, and became a parson, and died only three years back at Winton St. Mary, she had heard. Mr. Tape asked whether she remembered the church in which the wedding had taken place. To be sure she did; it was St. Andrew’s Undershaft; she remembered how dark it looked, and how awed the other witness had appeared to be, a rough soldier who was fetched in from the street, and was a little overtaken with liquor. And, strange to say, this was the second time she had been asked about this incident of long ago, a miserable-looking old gentleman having called upon her three years before; after talking with her, he had left the house without so much as asking for a tankard of her home-brewed.