Pale as the Dead

by Fiona Mountain

  As the measure of Glenfiddich was being poured, Natasha dug down into her pocket for change but Mary shooed it away. ‘Have one for me,’ she said, patting her bump.

  James squeezed past to replenish Arnold’s tankard, and Natasha noticed how he allowed his hand to rest fleetingly on top of Mary’s tummy, a gesture both protective and proud. Natasha felt a pang. She’d sworn that once she was here she wouldn’t let herself think about how Marcus was spending the evening. If he was out on the town in Manchester, or spending the evening in a quiet village pub like this one – with someone else.

  ‘Did your visitor find you?’ James asked.

  She quelled a momentary flicker of hope. ‘No. Who do you mean?’

  ‘A young girl. Never seen her before. A bit skinny and pale, striking though. With long hair. She was in here earlier, asking after you. She certainly wasn’t dressed for the weather. Just wearing a grey dress.’

  Natasha instantly thought of Bethany and felt a twinge of apprehension. ‘You didn’t by any chance manage to get her name, did you?’

  ‘’Fraid not,’ he said. ‘Didn’t want to frighten her. She looked like she’d just seen a ghost as it was. Wandered in, asked where Orchard End was, said she was looking for Natasha Blake, and then disappeared.’

  ‘You make it all sound very mysterious, darling.’ Mary gave the bar top a wipe down with a damp cloth, replaced beer mats.

  ‘She never came,’ Natasha said. ‘Or I don’t think she did. I’ve been at home most of the day.’

  ‘Can’t have been very important then.’

  Mary handed Natasha a piece of paper and a biro. ‘Write your resolution down there.’

  Mary peered over Natasha’s shoulder, reciting as she wrote: ‘I resolve not to make any more resolutions that I can’t keep.’

  ‘Cheat.’ Mary tutted.

  At midnight Mary and James handed round champagne and plates of vol-au-vents and mini pizzas. Following which, James grabbed Natasha’s hand and they led everyone outside to hold hands in a circle and sing ‘Auld Langs Ayne’.

  The brittle, cold air was infused with the scent of wood smoke from a bonfire in the garden of one of Natasha’s neighbours. Fireworks were set off. There was a screech like a banshee, followed by a crack like a gunshot and a fizz of stars.

  At one in the morning, everyone headed home. Natasha walked back to the cottage, feeling a little drunk and sleepy.

  As she opened the door Boris set up a frantic barking and snarling. ‘Mad dog.’ She patted his head. ‘What are you making such a fuss about?’ He quietened a little and skulked behind her legs, tail drooping, almost tripping her up.

  She went through to the living room.

  Before she turned on the light she could see the red winking of the answering machine. Marcus? She sprang forward to switch it on. The beep was followed by a few seconds of hissing silence. Then the tape clicked off again. She dialled 1471 and listened to the automated voice saying that she was called at ten-fifteen but that the number was wittheld.

  The girl in the grey dress? She went back into the hallway to check in case a note might have been slipped through the letter box and had drifted under the rug or been blown into a corner by the draft when she opened the door. But there was nothing.

  Twelve

  THE SEVEN-FIFTEEN FROM Moreton to Paddington had been emptier than usual in these limbo days of early January. Natasha felt optimistic, glad to be working again, and to be going to London. It was a great place to visit when you lived somewhere else.

  The Society of Genealogists was the last building in a narrow, terrace off Charterhouse Buildings. It was identified by a gleaming brass plaque on the wall that gave a false impression of grandeur. Inside it was Dickensian. Dingy, cramped and slightly shabby, but Natasha felt at home there. She could rely on meeting the same faces in the record depositories and libraries she had to visit on a regular basis.

  Frank Sills was one of her favourites. He was serving behind the counter in the small bookshop that sold all the tools of the trade: library guides, computer software, record cards and pedigree charts. He gave Natasha a cheery nod as she went through to the cloakroom and lockers. He looked like a retired naval captain, though he had an eccentric taste in clothes.

  ‘Think it’s a bit over the top?’ He grinned, pointing to his tie: vermilion red, with a golden and black coat of arms complete with chevrons and lions.

  ‘It’s splendid, Frank.’ Natasha teased. ‘Anyone coming here should have an appreciation for family ties.’

  Frank’s rippling laughter followed her as she walked past the lower library, crammed with microfiche cabinets and binders along the windowsill.

  The upper library was lined with bookshelves. Boyd’s Marriage Index, overseas papers, peerages, the trade directories.

  Natasha went straight to the rows of blue medical registers, 1858–1920, arranged in chronological order half-way down the main isle. She eased sideways, past a long, narrow table at which a long-haired young man in a moss-green great coat was flicking through a pamphlet with yellowed pages and black and white pictures of steam trains.

  She selected the directory for 1861 and leafed through to the M’s. She ran a finger down the page.

  There were only three London doctors with the names Marshall, John. The first lived at 27a Aldeman Street, St Pancras and the second, a John Brake Marshall, resided at 21 Princes Street, Hanover Square. The third was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Marshall, John, 10 Savile Row.

  She jotted down the details, closed the directory and slotted it back in place, then skipped forward a decade to 1871. A thicker volume. More doctors, more Dr Marshalls. But yes. He was still there. Ten years older. Still living at 10 Savile Row.

  It was satisfying, plotting a summary of a life to be coloured in afterwards. John Marshall’s had, on the surface at least, followed a straight and steady path. Not moving house for at least twenty years. He was still in the same house in 1881. A larger practice maybe, or a dwindling one as he grew older, more respected and selective. But still there.

  It was a problem Natasha often had, getting carried away, diverted by the characters she encountered on route. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t really John Marshall she should be interested in. It was his daughter. J.M.

  * * *

  The Member’s Room reminded Natasha of her old sixth-form common room, with low, upholstered lounge chairs, photocopied posters tacked onto a cork notice board, scatterings of well-thumbed magazines.

  Toby Curtis, a researcher, popped his head round one of the Formica cupboards in the kitchen area. He came over and kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘You look terrific,’ he said, peering at her from beneath a long fringe of light brown hair.

  Toby had a small boy’s passion for outer space and computer games, any kind of gadget for that matter. He was the first person Natasha knew to have a Psion personal organiser, yet he dressed in Arran sweaters and faded corduroys and when he cooked her supper nowadays, in his mews cottage in Hampstead – a property investment of his father’s – they would have a glass or two of port afterwards. Like children playing at being adults.

  Toby was Natasha’s junior by two years, handsome, in a bumbling, boyish sort of way, and she teased that he was the little brother she’d never had. It was partly true, but was also a gentle warning off to avoid hurting him. He’d never disguised that he’d had a crush on her, ever since his brother, who was at Oxford with Natasha, had introduced them.

  Toby often helped Natasha with London-based aspects of her research.

  ‘So what brings you here?’ Toby said, pouring steaming water.

  ‘The smell of caffeine.’ Natasha flopped down into one of the chairs. ‘I’m trying to put an identity to a mysterious nineteenth-century diarist in the hopes that she’ll lead me to an even more mysterious twenty-first-century missing girl.’ She shifted piles of leaflets promoting family history societies, lectures and museums, to make room on the coffee ta
ble as Toby carried two mugs over.

  ‘So why aren’t the police trying to find her?’

  ‘I wish everyone would stop asking me that. Long story.’

  ‘There’s plenty of coffee in the jar.’

  ‘Another time maybe. So how’s it going with you?’

  ‘Oh you know, I’ve been waving my wand around in the hopes a beautiful girl will appear.’

  He asked her about Christmas and then regaled her with anecdotes from his skiing holiday with a bunch of friends. Months ago he’d asked her to go too and, listening to him, she wished she had.

  ‘So you’ll have to follow a line of ascent rather than descent to find this girl?’ Toby said thoughtfully. ‘They say you can never go back, but in this game that’s far easier than going forward.’

  ‘It’s just the same process you’d use in probate cases, if you were trying to locate the beneficiaries of an estate.’

  ‘I guess so. If a little less run of the mill.’ Toby tore open a packet of mints, offered Natasha one. ‘Well, if anyone can find her, it’s you.’

  Natasha popped a sweetie in her mouth. ‘Wish I shared your confidence.’

  Thirteen

  IT WAS JUST under a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Society of Genealogists to the Family Records Centre in Clerkenwell.

  Despite the hours she must’ve spent there, something within Nathasha still resisted the new building, a concertina edifice in red brick, with wide plate glass windows in an innocuous suburban street. Clerkenwell was a red light district in Shakespeare’s day, traditionally associated with Huguenot watchmakers and Italian immigrants, but Natasha had tried, in vain, to find much evidence or atmosphere of its more exotic past.

  The censuses were located in the Public Records Office search area on the first floor, an enormous room which also housed the wills and death duty registers. The walls of the room were lined with cabinets holding the microfilms and the centre filled with carousels for the fiches. The censuses covering 1841–91 had a designated area, with supporting surname indices, reference books and place name index.

  Systematically, Natasha collected a numbered black box from the shelves in the general reference area, then found her allotted microfilm reader. She went to the area of blue files first, for the 1861 census. Not holding out much hope, she checked the lists of London streets for which no census returns from that decade survived. The complete London returns had been lost for years, turning up not that long ago, at the back of a cupboard in the House of Lords of all places. Substantial sections of it were missing though.

  Yup. Savile Row was one of these. Naturally.

  No matter. The Marshalls hadn’t moved house over the next decade. Natasha went over to the brown files, for 1871, checked the Place Name Index to find what registration district Savile Row fell into, Westminster, St James. She made a note of the class code and folio number, took the microfilm from the cabinet, slipping in the numbered black box to mark the place.

  She went back to her reader, flicked the machine on, slipped and threaded on the spool, wound it round and cranked the switch, watching the names and pages swim past. She turned the dial to slow down as she neared the correct page, refined the focus.

  And there he was.

  John Marshall. Status: widower. Age: 52. Birthplace: Ely, Cambridge, England. Head of the household. Occupation: Surgeon.

  The details were handwritten but Natasha’s trained eye could read them easily enough. Inside 10, Savile Row on the evening of 2 April 1871 were three servants: Sarah Morris, cook; Emily Cooper, housemaid, and Alfred Dunkley, footman. Also present were four of Dr Marshall’s children. Three daughters, Ellen, aged twenty-nine, Ada aged twenty-one and Eleanor, aged ten. The only J, was Dr Marshall’s son, unsurprisingly another John, then aged twenty-five.

  Natasha’s heart sank. Damn. No daughters whose Christian names began with J. She stared fiercely at the screen for a moment as if the sheer force of her will could conjure one up.

  At least she succeeded in summoning an alternative.

  It was regular practice in Victorian times, and before, for the first born of each sex to be named after their respective parent but thereafter known by a middle name to avoid confusion. It would be possible then to assume that Dr Marshall’s deceased wife was called Ellen. Also possible, just maybe, that her eldest daughter had been given a second name which began with a J. Or perhaps Mrs Marshall’s name hadn’t been Ellen at all, and there was another, older girl, a Jane or Jenny or Joanna, who’d already married and left home when the 1871 census was taken.

  Natasha wound the film back, walked over to the photocopying machines and took a print of the relevant page.

  She went downstairs, doing quick mental calculations inside her head as she pushed through the heavy glass doors to the Office of National Statistics reading rooms. It was always exaggeratedly hushed in there, as if out of respect for the dead. You couldn’t forget that you were surrounded by them, thousands of names; thousands of lives and stories.

  As usual there were researchers poring studiously over the bulky indexes or conferring in whispers. There was just the occasional muted background clatter of the heavy bound registers with their brass corners being carefully hefted down or returned to the endless rows of pale grey metal cabinets.

  The entry for Ellen junior’s birth should be relatively easy to find. She was twenty-nine in 1871, and so born in 1842 or 1843.

  Ever since Natasha had studied heraldry – a basic requirement for someone in her profession – she couldn’t see any form of colour coding without automatically reflecting on what was symbolised, intentionally or not. The birth records were red, the heraldic colour of fortitude. The colour of magic. Also, the colour of blood. Green for the marriage indexes; appropriate, considering that on a coat of arms, green or vert, signified love. The death registers along the back of the room were, unsurprisingly, black, the shade of mourning, also the armorial colour of wisdom. Tucked in a corner next to the death indexes, not to the birth registers which was surely a more appropriate location, was another small section of books. The adoption registers, bound in red and buff with a yellow spine.

  Natasha had looked in those once, found nothing she didn’t already know, and had avoided them ever since.

  She went to the red birth registers at the far right of the room, beginning with the March quarter of 1842. She grabbed the fabric handle, the cloth covering slightly faded and frayed, and dragged it down, turned and rested it on the wooden angled reading shelf which ran the length of the aisle. She lifted over a wadge of waxy pages with neat, scripted entries in black ink. No Ellen Marshalls born in the registration district of Westminster St James at all. She reached for the June quarter. None registered then either. Nor during the September or December quarters. Or in any of the indexes covering 1843.

  She carried on resolutely into the next year. There was no law then, stipulating how soon after their birth babies had to be registered. It was often long after the event.

  And so it must have been with J.M. There she was, in the March quarter of 1844.

  Marshall Ellen, J.

  It was always a thrill to find, staring up at her from the indexes, or some obscure manuscript or old book, a name, a person she’d been searching for. People easily became addicted to genealogy, and that was the reason why. That sizzle of satisfaction. And she didn’t want to stop there. She wanted to go on breathing the life back into them through documents which illuminated, even if only glimmeringly their character, their joys and sorrows. Natasha knew that it was the same for Steven, when he dug down and found a piece of pottery, a coin, foundations or bones, a fragment of history itself, that had lain hidden for centuries. Small, personal details from the past, the ephemera of the day-to-day lives of a man or woman or child who lived a quiet, unextraordinary life, parallel to your own.

  J.M. was, in all probability, Ellen J. Marshall. Known by whatever the J. stood for. But Natasha restrained her excitement. She desperately didn’t want
to make a mistake. As she knew from the bitter experience of her early career, it was easy to see what you wanted to see, to waste hours, months, pursuing the wrong branch or the wrong tree altogether. She didn’t have months this time. Probably no more than two weeks if her theory about how long Bethany might wait for Adam to find her was close to the truth. If she wasn’t too late already. She crushed that thought, quickly filled in a priority order form for a copy of the birth certificate and handed it over with cash at the kiosk.

  Now she just had to prove that Ellen J. was the diarist.

  She went out into the foyer and rummaged around in her bag for her mobile. She found the number of the Royal College of Surgeons, asked to be put through to the library.

  The archivist, a softly spoken, elderly gentleman with a lilting Welsh accent, politely reiterated what, from previous experience, she’d expected to be told. They would gladly undertake a search for a biography of a Fellow. If he was eminent there was a chance there’d be an obituary as well. But they were inundated with requests for such information. She’d need to write in with the details and they’d call as soon as possible to let her know what was available. Then, as soon as they received a cheque for the photocopies, she’d have her information.

  ‘Oh. I see.’ She made sure she sounded suitably crestfallen but accepting. ‘I’ll have to do that then. It’s just that I was hoping to find something before my uncle flies back to America. You’re my last hope.’

  A moment’s hesitation. ‘Well, if it’s urgent, maybe we could hurry things along a bit. Why don’t you give me a call in the morning.’

  The phone beeped as she terminated the call.

  ‘My favourite girl.’ She pictured Steven at his desk at the university, surrounded by stacks of books and archaeological magazines, leaning back in his chair, shoving aside piles of papers to put his dusty boots up on the desk. ‘Just wondering. Have you found your girl?’