Drowned lives, p.38
Drowned Lives, page 38
George thought he’d ended the feud when he married Mary, but he was wrong. And I was the one who made him wrong. I prolonged the feud myself by breaking them up.
I know that your father Arthur was made bitter and cruel. For this, I apologise, as for everything else. And so it passed on to you, Christopher. And to how many more generations that follow? It has to be stopped. Once my own son was dead, it was already too late for me. But the Buckley name can’t be allowed to die.
There is only you left, Christopher. Don’t leave me to take the blame for destroying the Buckleys altogether. I’m giving you the power to stop it.
Your Great-Uncle Samuel
While I sat and stared at the letter, Rachel had carefully cleaned and oiled the third key. She also dripped some oil into the empty keyhole of the canal owners’ box and insisted on waiting for it to work.
‘So this is the third key,’ she said.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s the first.’
‘What?’
‘Remember Samuel’s will? He said he’d left me the second key and “the third was in the lock”. It didn’t make any sense at the time.’
‘But it does now?’
‘Of course. This is the first key. It’s William Buckley’s key.’
I was fidgeting with impatience, despite the fact that I’d waited so long already. I told myself there wouldn’t be anything in the box anyway. But I didn’t quite believe it.
Finally, Rachel allowed me to turn the key. It moved stiffly, but it moved, until it clicked into position with its two companions. Slowly I lifted the lid, marvelling at the smoothness of the action, the craftsmanship that had produced this object. I hardly dared to look in the box when it was open.
It was almost as empty as I’d feared – but not quite. In the bottom lay a sheet of what my mother would have called greaseproof paper, faded like parchment. And just showing through was something I recognised. A red blob of wax, with the image of a pit-head and a stylised beam-engine. The Ogley and Huddlesford Canal Company’s seal.
‘What can it be?’ asked Rachel.
We unfolded the paper and pulled out the documents that nestled inside. The contents made me sit back on my heels before I’d even begun to take in the details. They were recent, and devastating. There were letters, a contract full of mind-boggling figures and copies of certificates listing the directors of companies. I’d never heard of the companies, but some of the directors’ names were familiar, as were the signatures on the letters.
‘Well, that’s it. It looks as though we’ve got the complete evidence on the Parkers.’
‘And Lindley Simpson,’ said Rachel. ‘It doesn’t come as a surprise any more that MPs should be tied up in shady financial dealings.’
‘When the new link road goes through, they both stand to make a great deal of money.’
‘But Simpson is in the Ministry of Agriculture, isn’t he? Could he have any influence on the road scheme?’
‘I don’t know. But that’s probably beside the point. In the present climate, the mere fact that he’s in the government would be enough to create a scandal. He’d be hounded into resigning if this became public knowledge. It was what Andrew Hadfield was concealing. Leo Parker can hardly deny being involved. So Andrew had three people to protect – his uncle, his mother, and his future stepfather. No doubt he was deep into it himself somehow – there’s enough money in the pot to make them all millionaires.’
‘It was about money after all,’ said Rachel. ‘Not family.’
‘They must have found out that Samuel had this information, and they thought he was going to publish it. Parker and Simpson needed to stop the book to make sure their scheme went through.’
I realised Great-Uncle Samuel must have gone to great lengths to get hold of the material he’d hidden in the box. Probably he’d poured much of his resources into employing private investigators. Maybe he’d paid bribes to obtain some of the confidential documents. But they’d been important to him. They were what this was all about – obtaining the power to destroy the Parkers. He’d dedicated the last years of his life to it. And finally he’d laid his plans to pass the information on to me.
Rachel looked at me, and at the papers I held. ‘So what are you going to do, Chris? Send them to the newspapers? That would complete your revenge.’
‘Yes, it would.’
I thought about it for a long while, clutching in my hands the means to hit back at the Parkers. I pictured Leo Parker’s face, his impotent rage when it all came out, the disgrace of Lindley Simpson, the sensational stories in all the papers. And I felt a physical glow of satisfaction, the thrill of knowing that I’d brought retribution on behalf of my family. I smiled at the thought. It would be the culmination of everything Samuel had worked for, a justification for everything I’d gone through. Revenge. It was a sweet concept.
But then I met Rachel’s eyes, and the vision vanished abruptly. What was the point? What would I achieve by perpetuating the feud? I would ruin the final years of a sick old woman, and store up more animosity and bitterness for future generations to deal with. Presuming, of course, that there were going to be future generations of the Buckleys. Events had focused my mind on this issue like never before. When you lose your parents, you’re suddenly in the front line.
Meeting my grandmother had changed my perspective too. The Buckleys and Parkers no longer seemed like two rival families locked in conflict over the generations. As Leo himself had said, we weren’t just related, but inextricably entangled. I’d even been back to his house in Hints to visit Mary again, and had taken her some flowers for her room, hoping for a flicker of recognition, desperate to draw back the curtains and let in the sunlight.
And I knew that a continuation of the feud wasn’t what Samuel had wanted. He’d given me the power to stop it. That was exactly what his letter said. Two hundred years were enough. Instead of a weapon to be used, he’d bequeathed to me a deterrent that would ensure peace. All I had to do was reconcile myself to keeping quiet about the dealings of Leo Parker and Lindley Simpson, and the true motives of Andrew Hadfield. It was a sacrifice. But it was nothing compared to the sacrifice that Samuel had made himself.
And he hadn’t just given me this power, had he? He’d given me the choice to use it, or not. Was this what it had all been about? Great-Uncle Samuel had forced me to grow up, to take responsibility and make my own decisions. Caroline said he’d been keeping an eye on me. And perhaps he was still watching over me now.
‘No, they won’t go to the newspapers,’ I said. ‘I think a safe deposit box in a bank somewhere would be the answer. And a carefully drawn will. No doubt Mr Elsworth could help me with that.’
‘So that’s it, then?’ asked Rachel.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s all over.’
55
A few days later I was in London to see the editor of a new magazine covering ‘green’ issues, trying to persuade him that my services would be valuable to him. It seemed as though I’d convinced him with my presentation, and I came away with a small clutch of commissions that would mean a few hundred pounds in my pocket. With the book selling well back home, things were starting to look up for my future career as a freelance writer and journalist.
I’d set off from Trent Valley Station that morning on the 7:59, the direct service via Tamworth Low Level and Nuneaton, taking an hour and forty-five minutes to Euston. I’d been intending to catch the 17:25 to get back to Lichfield, but there was another train later, and I had nothing to rush back for.
I don’t know what made me think about it just then. Maybe it was the idea of having something to celebrate at last that put anniversaries and birthdays in my mind. But it had been niggling at me for some time that I didn’t know Great-Uncle Samuel’s exact date of birth. Among all the mass of information we’d collected, it was one detail that seemed to be missing.
Of course, I’d entrusted the research into the registers to the woman I knew as Laura Jenner. But if she ever took the trouble to find out, the information had gone with her when she disappeared after visiting me at the hospital. Caroline Longden had been refusing to speak to me for some time. And only the years, not the dates, had been on Samuel’s headstone at Whittington.
But now I found I had time on my hands before catching the evening train back to Birmingham. So I took the tube across London to Islington, emerging at Angel, and asked the way to Myddelton Street, which turned out to be near Sadler’s Wells Theatre. The General Register Office was in a large building called the Family Records Centre. Since it was a Thursday, the centre was open until seven o’clock. More than enough time for what I wanted.
I found there were four huge red-bound volumes for births registered in 1916, which divided the year into four quarters. There was nothing for it but to start with the January to March volume and work my way through.
I tried to recall the events of that year. April had seen the Easter Rising in Dublin, Lloyd George became Prime Minister, and sixty thousand men had been killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. But that was about all I could bring to mind. They seemed to have so little personal significance compared to the birth of Samuel Buckley, the man who’d wreaked such havoc in my life.
I settled myself down and began to go through the names in the first volume. Would Samuel have been a winter baby or a summer one? There was no way of knowing, but at least I was looking for a fairly unusual name in Buckley. It wasn’t as if I was searching for one of the ubiquitous Parkers.
I passed from March to the June volume, and then to September. All too soon I’d reached December and the end of the four volumes for 1916. I frowned, sure that I couldn’t have missed the name Buckley. But I decided that my concentration must have wandered at the wrong moment, so I turned back and went through them again more slowly, making sure I read every name. There was no Samuel Buckley entered.
An assistant saw that I was getting frustrated and came over to help me. She suggested trying the years either side of 1916, as a mistake could easily be made. She asked me whether Samuel had been specific about his year of birth. And even if he had, she said, old people could sometimes get a little confused about their own age.
It sounded reasonable to me. A little reassured, I took the new volumes she gave me and went carefully through 1915. That was the year Alfred Buckley had joined the Army Ordnance Corps, the year the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat and tanks were invented. Then I went through 1917. The Russian Revolution.
Increasingly anxious, I tried 1914 and 1918. Nothing. After a couple of hours, I’d reached as far back as 1913, when George was born, and as far forward as 1919, when I found the birth of Mary Parker. Those five years in between were a yawning gap, with no Buckleys registered.
By now, the assistant had taken pity on me. Or maybe she was worried that I’d still be there at closing time, turning the pages madly with a desperate stare, like a man haunted by some obsession. She diplomatically suggested trying a year or two earlier still, before Alfred and Eliza had married. She refrained from pointing out that my Great-Uncle Samuel might have been a bastard.
But that was impossible. Samuel had been the younger son, and I’d already identified George’s birth, registered in 1913, two years after the wedding. I tried again. My notebook and pencil lay unused on the table, and my eyes were tired and beginning to water from the effort of staring at the lists of names for so long.
‘We’ll be closing quite soon,’ said the assistant, probably wondering whether she’d made a mistake in encouraging me to stay.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m nearly finished.’
I started again from the beginning, going through the lists a third time, refusing to believe what my eyes were telling me, still convinced I’d made some stupid mistake, a simple oversight. Laura had done this research, and she never mentioned such an omission. But then I remembered who Laura was. She’d lied to me all along, so what was one more untruth?
But no matter how many times I went through the index, there was no birth registered for Samuel Buckley. There was no birth registered for anyone by the name of Buckley, not after George in 1913. There had been no Samuel Buckley born in South Staffordshire in nearly a decade. There was nothing. The man I’d thought to be my great-uncle simply didn’t exist.
‘Well, there could be an explanation,’ said Rachel that night. She’d found me unshaved, with a bottle of beer in my hand and several empties on the floor by the armchair. There was a great heap of papers scattered around, where I’d thrown them in a rage. It seemed as though I’d wasted months of my life.
‘Yes, of course there’s an explanation,’ I said. ‘I’ve been conned again. What a bloody simpleton I am. They’ve had me for a complete fool, the whole lot of them. And all because I didn’t bother to check properly. Christ.’
‘Look, there could be a mistake in the records. It does happen sometimes. Or he might have been registered somewhere else, and just forgotten about it.’
‘Forgotten?’
‘His family could have been out of the area when they registered him.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
But I could see that she didn’t look convinced. ‘He told me he was born in Tamworth Street,’ I said.
‘Did he say that specifically?’
I paused, trying to think back to the old man’s words, while Rachel glared at me impatiently. But my brain was fuzzy. And anyway I didn’t want to think about it, not for a while.
‘Well, did he?’ she repeated.
‘I can’t remember,’ I said, slumping into my armchair.
‘Well, there you are. You can’t remember what you were told in the last few months. And yet you expect an old man to remember the details of something that happened eighty-three years ago.’
‘It’s different.’
She shuffled through her notebook with her head down, so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Her tenseness made me suspicious. Over the months, we’d become so close that I’d learned to read her thoughts as easily as she read mine.
‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘there’s something you’re not telling me.’
She nodded reluctantly. ‘I never thought you were right to trust that woman you called Laura Jenner. All that research she said she’d do … well, I went and did it myself.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. It was while I was visiting my sister. I never went to the matinee of Cats – I was at the Family Records Centre that day instead. I went over all the same ground that Laura Jenner said she’d covered. At first I thought she was a poor researcher, that she was missing too many things. But of course she was lying to you all along, Chris. Everything she did was intended to mislead. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said feebly.
She was looking down at her notebook, and I still couldn’t see her eyes. I experienced the sort of awful feeling in my stomach that I’d only ever read about – a sinking, a plummeting, a dreadful wrench in the belly that foretold bad news. Her manner warned me that there was another revelation to come, just when I thought the whole business was over. And right now I was in no fit state for any more nasty surprises.
‘Get it over with, Rachel, please.’
‘All right. Yes, I checked the indexes myself a long time ago and found there was no Samuel Buckley entered. I went through the actual registers, and there was still no Samuel. I looked hard, Chris. I really looked very hard, in every conceivable place. But the fact is, there’s no record for the birth of anyone called Samuel Buckley. There’s no doubt your great-grandparents only ever registered the birth of one child, and that was your grandfather, George.’
She looked up at me then, watching my face for a reaction. But I was beyond reacting now. I’d already been to the bottom of this pit, and concluded that the whole awful business had been for nothing.
‘It would have been easy at that stage to give up and decide Samuel Buckley didn’t exist,’ she said, ‘that the man claiming to be your great-uncle was a fake. But why should he do something like that? And who was he? It didn’t make sense. I thought there had to be another answer.’
‘And so you made sense of it, did you? You found an answer where I couldn’t?’
She flushed and turned back to her notebook. ‘I found the answer here in Lichfield, in the County Records Office. In the records of the Thomas Ella Trust, in fact.’
‘Hold on. Thomas Ella?’
‘Yes, the Reverend Thomas Ella.’
‘The canal proprietor?’
‘The same man.’
‘Samuel wrote more about him than any of the other proprietors,’ I said. ‘He described him as a visionary, who was almost single-handedly responsible for getting the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal scheme under way. He was a prominent personality, the headmaster of a local school.’
‘He also said that Ella was “a real gentleman and scholar”, generous, public spirited, a conscientious teacher and a good father,’ Rachel added.
‘Yes, all that and plenty more.’ I could see the appropriate page of the manuscript in front of my eyes as I spoke. ‘The Reverend Thomas Ella took snuff, gambled at cards and enjoyed brandy and wine. He bought silver buckles for his shoes and had silk handkerchiefs. He raised pigs. He was secretary of a circulating library and took an active interest in local politics. Oh, and his first wife had died, but he married again and had five children. It’s all imprinted on my memory after the book. Samuel made him sound like a hero.’
‘And with good reason, I think.’
I watched Rachel carefully. ‘Go on.’
‘There was another thing Samuel wrote about Thomas Ella. Do you remember the death of his son, who lived for only three weeks?’
