The Merchant's Daughter

by M J Lee

  ‘That’s them. It’s the same names as in the notebook. But there’s no race attached to the name.’

  Jayne sighed. ‘Strange. I was certain this was your African ancestor.’

  ‘Who, Dolores Sharpe? Emily’s mother?’

  Jayne nodded. ’But there is no racial status for the child. If Dolores had been black, it would have been stated on the register. The child would have been named as a mulatto. We can check Henry’s birth records too.’

  She typed in the name, and the same information appeared in the same copperplate writing.

  July 18. Henry Roylance, son of Jeremiah and Dolores (nee Sharpe) of Perseverance Estate.

  ‘The clerk even gives her maiden name on this record.’

  ‘She definitely was Emily and Henry’s mother.’

  ‘Finally, we can check the marriage.’ Jayne typed in a new address for Select Caribbean Marriages, 1591 to 1905. Again, one hit was recorded.

  January 2, 1804. Jeremiah Roylance, Merchant, to Dolores Sharpe, Housekeeper.

  ‘It seems Jeremiah married one of his servants.’

  ‘And that’s probably why she didn’t return with them to England. An ambitious family like yours had to be accepted in polite society, but if your wife was a former servant then that would have been difficult.’

  ‘So we still don’t know who my African ancestor was?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘So I’ll have to face the red-tops this weekend with nothing to say except “I’m going to find out who it was”?’

  ‘I’m sorry once again. I tried my best, but the timing was just too short.’

  Rachel took a cheque out of her pocket and looked at it. ‘I believe we had an agreement, Jayne. No results, no payment.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Rachel tore the cheque into little pieces, letting them drift down slowly to the Persian carpet. ‘I’ll thank you to leave my house immediately. I do not want to see or hear from you ever again.’

  Chapter fifty-nine

  Thursday, August 22, 2019

  Wickham Hall, Cheshire

  Outside in her BMW, Jayne banged the rim of the steering wheel in frustration. She didn’t care about the money, but she hated letting her clients down. Sir Harold Marlowe deserved whatever he got, but ultimately she had failed.

  A wave of anger spread through her body and the words of her mother came whispering in her ear.

  ‘You’ll never be a success, Jayne, you’re too weak ever to do well.’

  She knew it was stupid to think like this. Her mother had many problems, most of which she laid at Jayne’s door. She recognised her mother’s constant demeaning of her had driven her on to succeed at whatever she did. Failure wasn’t something she experienced often and, when she did, she hated the feeling it gave her.

  All the police vehicles had already left, just leaving their tyre traces in the gravel of the drive.

  She sat for five minutes, alone in the car and alone in her world.

  She couldn’t face going home to an empty house, not with that graffiti daubed on her kitchen walls. She switched on the engine and listened as it purred over, like a cat waiting to pounce.

  It was time to go and see Robert and Vera. Time to be around people who cared for her, and to be as far away from here as she could.

  Putting the car in gear, she glanced back at Wickham Hall. It no longer looked beautiful to her.

  All she could see was the sweat, blood and tears of thousands of slaves whose hard graft and sad lives had helped to create it.

  Chapter sixty

  Thursday, August 22, 2019

  Buxton Residential Home, Derbyshire.

  When Jayne arrived, Robert and Vera were sitting in their usual places out in the garden, a completed crossword lying between them. They weren’t talking, just enjoying the silence and each other’s company.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Jayne.

  ‘Hello, lass, we weren’t expecting you till tomorrow.’

  ‘I just thought I’d come to visit you early.’

  Robert’s eyes narrowed and he looked her up and down. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘I’m fine, Robert.’

  ‘I've known you since you were five years old, Jayne Sinclair. When you say “I’m fine,” it means you’re not. What’s up, lass?’

  There was no hiding anything from Robert. She told him everything that had happened that morning and her research into the family history of the Marlowes.

  It was Vera who spoke first. ‘You did the right thing, Jayne. I don’t care who they are, these people should be ashamed of trying to frighten you. All for their family honour! Pah, they have no family honour.’

  She gave her stepmother a big hug. ‘Thanks, Vera, I knew I could rely on you.’

  ‘But it’s not about them, is it, Jayne?’ Robert asked shrewdly.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It's about the feeling you failed, isn’t it? You let down a client, didn’t solve the problem?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I know you, lass. You’ve always been the same. Like your mother – driven, unhappy with second best. It’s one of the things I love about you.’

  She bent down and gave Robert a hug too until he said, ‘Now, don't go all soppy on me, Jayne Sinclair.’ When she had stood up, he continued speaking. ‘Let me have a look at the research? I have a couple of thoughts that may help.’

  She opened up her laptop and clicked on the case file. While she chatted with Vera, Robert pored over the notes, checking them against the family tree. He couldn’t read Emily Roylance’s notebook, so Jayne explained the contents to him.

  ‘Well, lass, I think you were right to look at the mother, she was the obvious choice. But there’s one other possibility you should check.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Charles Carruthers. If there were no children from the Marlowe family, and none from Henry Roylance either, then it strikes me that the African ancestor must have come from somewhere else. And the one obvious location is the union between Emily and Charles, which produced the child Royston Marlowe – or to give him his real name, Liberty Carruthers.’

  Jayne thought for a moment. ‘I think you’re right, Dad.’ She took the laptop and checked the Wikipedia entry for the Carruthers family of Liverpool. ‘Listen to this.’ She began reading the article out loud.

  ‘“James Carruthers was a prominent Liverpool clergyman who, along with his two sons, Charles and Ebenezer, was at the heart of the anti-slavery movement in Liverpool. James was born into a Quaker family and at the age of 22 was sent overseas to Barbados in the Caribbean to spread the word of God, particularly amongst the African slaves in that area. He clashed repeatedly with the estate owners and managers, criticising their inhumanity and the treatment of the slaves under their control repeatedly in three pamphlets published after 1807. After the Bussa’s rebellion of 1816, many of the planters ostracised him, banning their workers and slaves from attending his church. He returned to Liverpool in 1817, rapidly making contact with William Wilberforce and becoming one of his right-hand men in the north of England.”

  ‘“Little is known about his personal life. He married once in 1798 in Barbados, to one Madeleine Clay. His two sons were active in the anti-slavery movement. Charles, a fine orator, was based in Manchester and died in 1834 before realising his dream of freeing the slaves. Ebenezer moved to Africa, becoming one of the first missionaries to that continent. He died in 1843 from beriberi. James Carruthers died in his bed in Liverpool in 1850, leaving his estate and his collection of pamphlets, speeches and notes to his daughter. These were passed to Liverpool Council in 1903 and can now be found in the International Slavery Museum on the waterfront.”’

  She paused for a moment. ‘Those are the records we saw, Robert. I think you’re on to something.’

  She quickly opened up the Barbados birth records again. ‘I wonder if Charles was born in Barbados?’ she wondered aloud.

  She ty
ped ‘James Carruthers’ into the search field. There were two hits in different handwriting.

  September 18, 1801. Charles Carruthers, son of James and Madeleine (nee Clay), Negro, of St George’s Parish.

  April 1, 1803. Ebenezer Carruthers, son of James and Madeleine (African) of this parish.

  Jayne sat back. ‘It was staring me in the face all the time. The African ancestor came from Charles Carruthers’ line when he married Emily and she gave birth to Liberty.’

  ‘It’s always there in the documents, lass, you just have to look in the right place.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Jayne?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Do? With the information, you mean?’

  Vera nodded. ‘You owe your client nothing. They haven’t paid you for your work and asked you never to get in touch with them again.’

  ‘I don’t care about the money, Vera, you know that.’

  Jayne thought for a moment. What was the right thing to do?

  After a few minutes she opened up her laptop and composed an email.

  Dear Rachel,

  Please find attached the following birth certificates. As you can see, Charles Carruthers’ mother was listed as being Negro in the birth registry. As Liberty Carruthers was adopted by Henry Roylance as his son and renamed Royston Marlowe, he is most likely your African ancestor.

  Please use this information as and when you wish.

  I do not want any payment from you for my work, nor do I want to be involved with your family in any way at all. In my opinion, you all deserve each other.

  If you are so inclined, I would donate the money to the charity of your choice.

  Best regards,

  Jayne Sinclair

  She clicked the send button and sat back. ‘You know what, I won’t be unhappy if I never see that client again.’

  Robert held up his newspaper. ‘I think that’s going to be hard, Jayne, she’s just signed a Hollywood contract to play Superwoman.’

  The picture was of Rachel Marlowe dressed in a tight blue leotard and red cape.

  ‘Well, that’s one picture I won’t be going to see.’

  Vera announced, ‘The tea round’s due any minute. I’ll get the packet of chocolate digestives from my room.’

  As Vera left, Robert said, ‘You can’t win them all, you know. Sometimes you just have to accept that some problems can’t be solved.’

  ‘I know, Robert. I’m learning.’ In the back of her mind, she was thinking about the divorce. ‘Sometimes we just have to accept that things can’t be perfect, but they work out in the end.’

  ‘Aye, lass, now here’s Violet with the trolley. Can you get me a tea with three sugars and a milky coffee for Vera?’

  She stood up and bent over to kiss the top of his head. ‘You’re so sweet, Robert.’

  ‘I know, it’s the sugar in the tea.’

  THE END

  <<<<>>>>

  Historical Note

  As ever with the Jayne Sinclair novels, the subject matter came along by chance. I was visiting Liverpool one day to research something else and found time to pop in to the International Slavery Museum at the waterfront. It’s a fascinating and unique place to visit, dealing as it does with the slave trade and Britain’s unique place in it.

  At the same time I became aware of the work of University College London on the Legacies of British Slave Ownership and its searchable database. I typed in the area where I live and immediately three names came up of a family who were slave owners and received money from the British government to free their slaves in 1834.

  Additionally, I had recently received an updated version of my DNA results from Ancestry and a story began to form.

  Further researches in Hansard, the transcript of Parliamentary debates, led me to some fascinating exchanges regarding the Emancipation Act, which came into force in 1834. As ever, the two sides of the argument talked at odds with each other. One argued about the moral inequity of slavery, and the other for an economic imperative and property rights. In the middle of the debates from 1832 to 1833, the attitude of the British government changed. From advancing a loan of fifteen million pounds to assist the planters in freeing their slaves, this became an outright purchase of their freedom with a fund of twenty million – the equivalent of seventeen billion pounds in today’s money. It was then nearly 40 per cent of the government’s yearly budget and, amazingly, the UK only finished paying the loan back in 2015!

  Almost 6,000 people from all over the British Isles received the money from a special department created to disburse it. Politicians, churchmen, businessmen, factory owners, traders, ship owners and countless ordinary people were paid a sum for freeing their slaves. Many small families, sometimes owning only one or two slaves, received funds. Larger amounts were paid out too; the Gladstones of Liverpool and of prime ministerial fame, received over 93,000 pounds for 2,039 slaves, the equivalent of twelve million pounds today.

  The government department responsible for disbursing the money kept meticulous records. To check if your family were slave owners or received money, it is possible to search the database at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. The documents here are incredibly detailed, recording who received the money, why they received it and how many slaves they received it for. Each slave having a particular price dependent on their age, sex, and skills. They were property and were priced as one would price a wagon or a plot of land.

  The slaves themselves, of course, received nothing. Instead, they had to work for the next five years as apprentices and were then freed with no land, no work and no money. Most stayed on their estates to work for a pittance, or migrated to the uncolonised interior of the island of Barbados to farm poor land.

  There were also the physical results of slavery, seen throughout the United Kingdom. Some of the most important buildings built at the time came about through being funded from the profits of slavery.

  Even after slavery was abolished in 1834, the money received for the freeing of the slaves often went into constructing the railways, canals, factories, banks and insurance companies that created the Industrial Revolution and the great Victorian age.

  The precise impact of this huge disbursement of money has still to be assessed. Did it finance the second stage of the Industrial revolution? The jury is still out.

  The speeches in this book come from research into the pamphlets of the time and the various meetings held by both pro- and anti-slavery groups.

  The anti-slavery societies were particularly effective at creating a mass movement against slavery through a series of petitions, which effectively forced the British government to revise its position.

  But in my opinion, there was also a realisation by the large planters that the system was no longer economically viable when the source of slaves was cut off by the banning of their capture and trade in 1807. When this was combined with revolts by the slaves themselves in Barbados in 1816, Guyana in 1824 and Jamaica in 1833, the end of slavery in the British colonies was unstoppable, if not inevitable.

  One last thank you to Peter Calver, founder of LostCousins, www.lostcousins.com, for his advice, especially on the DNA aspects of the novel. The science and possibilities of this new technology are changing constantly. I am very grateful to Peter for taking the time to explain the latest developments to me. Any errors in the history or the science, however, are my own.

  Finally, the last word must go to a former slave. In this case, an American – Frederick Douglas – writing in 1845.

  ‘No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.’

  The impact of slavery is still being felt on British society today as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have yet to come to terms with it.

  If you enjoyed reading this Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon. It will help other readers know how much you enjoyed the book.

  If you would like to get in touch,
I can be reached at www.writermjlee.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

  Other books in the Jayne Sinclair Series:

  The Irish Inheritance

  When an adopted American businessman who is dying of cancer asks her to investigate his background, it opens up a world of intrigue and forgotten secrets for Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator.

  She only has two clues: a book and an old photograph. Can she find out the truth before her client dies?

  The Somme Legacy

  Who is the real heir to the Lappiter millions? This is the problem facing genealogical investigator Jayne Sinclair.

  Her quest leads to a secret that has been buried in the trenches of World War One for over a hundred years – and a race against time to discover the truth of the Somme Legacy.

  The American Candidate

  Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator, is tasked to research the family history of a potential candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America. A man whose grandfather had emigrated to the country seventy years before.

  When the politician who commissioned the genealogical research is shot dead in front of her, Jayne is forced to flee for her life. Why was he killed? And who is trying to stop the details of the American Candidate’s family past from being revealed?

  The Vanished Child

  What would you do if you discovered you had a brother you never knew existed?

  On her deathbed, Freda Duckworth confesses to giving birth to an illegitimate child in 1944 and placing him in a children’s home. Seven years later she returned for him, but he had vanished. What happened to the child? Why did he disappear? Where did he go?

  Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator, is faced with lies, secrets and one of the most shameful episodes in recent history as she attempts to uncover the truth.

  Can she find the vanished child?

  The Silent Christmas