“I was just about to offer you a non-grandfather,” said he; “there was a connection of the Stauntons of Warwickshire—not a Longbridge Staunton but a cousin—who cannot be accounted for and might perhaps have gone to Canada at the age of eighteen or so. By a very long shot he might have been your grandfather; without better evidence it would be guesswork to say he was. But then during the Easter vacation I had a flash. You otiose ass, Pledger-Brown, I said to myself, you’ve never thought of Staunton as a place-name. It is an elementary rule in this work, you know, to check place-names. There is Staunton Harold in Leicestershire and two or three Stantons, and of course I had quite overlooked Staunton in Gloucestershire. So off I went and checked parish records. And there he was in Gloucestershire: Albert Henry Staunton, born April 4, 1866, son of Maria Ann Dymock, and if you can find a better West Country name than Dymock, I’d be glad to hear it.”

“What kind of Staunton is he?” I asked.

“He’s an extraordinarily rum Staunton,” said Pledger-Brown, “but that’s the best of it. You get not only a grandfather but a good story as well. You know, so many of these forbears that people ferret out are nothing at all; I mean, perfectly good and reputable, but no personal history of any interest. But Albert Henry is a conversation-piece. Now listen.

“Staunton is a hamlet about ten miles north-west of Gloucester, bearing over toward Herefordshire. In the middle of the last century it had only one public house, called the Angel, and by rights it ought to have been near a church named for the Annunciation, but it isn’t. That doesn’t matter. What is important is that in the 1860s there was an attractive girl working at the Angel who was called Maria Ann Dymock, and she must have been a local Helen, because she was known as Mary Dymock the Angel.”

“A barmaid?” I asked, wondering how Father was going to take to the idea of a barmaid.

“No, no,” said Adrian; “barmaids are a bee in the American bonnet. A country pub of that time would be served by its landlord. Maria Ann Dymock was undoubtedly a domestic servant. But she became pregnant, and she said the child’s father was George Applesquire, who was the landlord of the Angel. He denied it and said it could have been several other men. Indeed, he said that all Staunton could claim to be the child’s father, and he would have nothing to do with it. He or his wife turned Maria Ann out of the Angel.

“Now, the cream of the story is this. Maria Ann Dymock must have been a girl of some character, for she bore the child in the local workhouse and in due time marched off to church to have it christened. ‘What shall I name the child?’ said parson. ‘Albert Henry,’ said Maria Ann. So it was done. ‘And the father’s name?’ said parson; ‘shall I say Dymock?’ ‘No,’ said Maria Ann, ‘say Staunton, because it’s said by landlord the whole place could be his father, and I want him to carry his father’s name.’ I get all this out of the county archaeological society’s records, which include quite an interesting diary of the clergyman in question, whose name was the Reverend Theophilus Mynors, by the way. Mynors must have been a sport, and probably he thought the girl had been badly used by Applesquire, because he put down the name as Albert Henry Staunton in the parish record.