It emerges that Richmond, bored with being kept at home with nothing to do, has assumed the leadership of a smuggling gang operating over Romney Marsh and has staged the hauntings at the Dower House himself in order to scare off attention and use the decayed building as a store for contraband.

Richmond's activities eventually bring him to the suspicious notice of Lieutenant Ottershaw, the self-righteous head of the local Land-Guard Preventive service, who sets a trap for the young man that results in his being shot and badly hurt.

Ottershaw arrives and high-handedly demands that Richmond strip off the coat that is concealing his bandages but is haughtily outfaced by Lady Aurelia and is forced to leave in fear for his job.

His lordship has already been dumbfounded, as was most of the rest of the family, to learn that Hugo is in fact the Harrow-educated grandson and heir to a wealthy mill-owner with the financial means to reverse the decline in the Darracott holdings.

At the close of the very first paragraph, the narrative is interrupted by the thoughts of a young footman in the slang of the time: Charles had not been employed at Darracott Place above six months, but he was not such a whopstraw as to make the least noise in the performance of his duties when his lordship was out of humour.

Stiff-rumped, that's what he was, always nabbing the rust, or riding grub, like he had been for months past.Though Hugo puts on a Yorkshire accent as part of his deceit of the family, his groom John Joseph invariably speaks in even broader dialect, reporting to his master of the ghostly occurrences at the Dower House that There's been no dragoons stationed thereabouts this while back, and no manner of good gin there had been for Clotton – him as is his lordship's head groom – tells me that they'd got so that they took every bush for a boggart, and reet laughable it was one night when a couple of 'em – nobbut ignorant lads!

– came sticklebutt into t'Blue Lion, frining and faffling that there was a flaysome thing jangling round t'Dower House, and wailing fit to freeze t'blood in a body's veins.The gist of either narration is more or less clear, but the full meaning can only be gained from the specialist vocabularies and dictionaries where the author had collected these expressions in the first place.

[9] A fourth level of comedic social differentiation is manifested in the jockeying for predominance between servants, especially in the case of the two valets Crimplesham and Polyphant, who castigate each other in the politest manner but with the most malign intentions.

The same stratagem allows Claud a similar opportunity to shine: not in the continuing contest between himself and his elegant older brother throughout the book, but in the field of melodrama, squeamishly playing the role of the victim of a loutish ambush.

That the lieutenant is outwitted by the coming together of a frivolous aristocratic family generally at odds with each other, but also in a position to overturn any legal challenge the Preventive Land Service may direct against them, is a social injustice, however true it is to its time – and possibly in line with the heavily taxed author's own sympathies at the moment of writing.