It was Jack who filled the void. ‘So, tell me about your life, Margaret,’ he said, with a smile which suggested he was fully aware of the vastness of his question.
Margaret laughed. ‘Well, Jim and I are retired now, although he can’t quite stop messing about with fishing boats and giving advice to the younger ones in the village. We’ve got a nice little place overlooking the sea. I say I’m retired, but actually I seem to do more now than I did when I was working. I’m involved in lots of village activities, we go walking. I bake…’ She shrugged. ‘That’s probably my life at the moment!’
‘Sounds idyllic. How long have you lived in Cornwall?’ Jack asked. ‘Your accent sounds pretty Cornish now.’
‘Does it really? I don’t hear it, myself.’ Margaret said. ‘Gosh… When did I move down there? December 1976. I just had to get away from Folkestone. Stayed there ever since.’
‘And what did you do down there—before you retired?’ Jack enquired.
‘What didn’t I do?’ Margaret answered. ‘When I first moved down there I had visions of starting up my own little tearoom. My granny, Nellie,’ she said with a nod to Morton, ‘taught me to bake and it was all I thought I was good at.’ She paused to bite from a chunk of garlic bread, then laughed: ‘Of course, I didn’t take into account all the finances and what-have-you of running a business and ended up working in someone else’s tearoom. Two months into the job and that lump over there—’ she aimed her fork at Jim, ‘—walks in declaring his love, we get married and I stop working to raise two little girls.’
Jack grinned. ‘So, you deprived the good folk of Cornwall of Farrier’s Tearoom, then, huh?’
‘Probably not a bad thing,’ Margaret responded. ‘When the girls were growing up I did some volunteering in school, which led to a temporary job as a teaching assistant that lasted nigh-on twenty years.’
‘Wow. What about starting up that tearoom now?’ Jack asked.
‘Oh, my goodness gracious, no. I make enough scones, jam, and cakes as it is for various fetes and charity sales.’ She cut a portion of her lasagne, then suddenly seemed to notice that by comparison with the rest of the table, she had barely touched her food. ‘I must stop talking. It looks like I’ve hardly eaten a thing. What about you, Jack? What line of work did you get into? Was I right in thinking you were into archaeology or some such thing?’
Morton’s pulse quickened as he looked to Jack in anticipation. This was the first time that any hint of their previous relationship had been alluded to; up until now they might as well have been strangers forced into conversation at the dinner party of a mutual acquaintance.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Jack confirmed. ‘Well, kinda. I flunked out of Boston University and moved to San Francisco where I studied forensic archaeology. Laura and I moved to Alberta, Canada, where I now lecture in the subject, undertaking the odd investigation here and there.’
‘Sounds like you’ve done alright. And you’ve got a nice boy, too,’ Margaret said, nodding towards George at the other end of the table.
‘Two, actually,’ Jack corrected.
‘Oh,’ Margaret said, ‘you’ve got another one at home. He didn’t fancy a holiday, then?’
‘Not at home,’ Jack said. ‘Right here.’ He turned and patted Morton on his shoulder.
It was a moment so unexpectedly touching for Morton that he was forced to tip his head down, as if inspecting something in his dinner, to avoid anybody seeing the moisture rising in his lower eyelids. Margaret’s facial expressions suggested that his words had somehow embarrassed her.
Jack, seeming not to have noticed either reaction, held forth, ‘Yeah, George is into computer programming. Something to do with software creation.’
‘Oh, I know just what you mean,’ Margaret joked. ‘And is he with anyone?’
‘There’s a question, jeez,’ Jack said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. ‘He got married young—in his early twenties—but that didn’t work out. After that he had a string of girlfriends. The ones Laura and I approved of he dumped, the ones we didn’t approve of he moved in with or got engaged to.’ Jack smiled and raised his hands dismissively. ‘Now he’s doing the dating online thing.’
Morton listened to the pair of them intently as they continued to speak about their lives. He was like an unseen observer, hungrily snatching at new titbits of information which added to that which he knew of his biological parents. It was interesting to scrutinise their conversation, both of them having relayed some key events from their lives, without once referring back to their meeting in Folkestone in January 1974. The hiatus created by Margaret and Jack’s being mid-mouthful gave Morton a window to broach the subject. ‘It’s funny,’ he began, looking at Jack, ‘that you packed up and left home in December 1976 and went to the other side of the country—’ then he faced Margaret, ‘—and you left home in December 1976 and went to the other side of this country.’
‘Oh my God,’ Jack said, while Margaret just raised her eyebrows.
Morton knew that she was uncomfortable but he had one more thing to say. ‘Which was when you, Jack, wrote your last letter to Aunty Margaret.’
Jack nodded in agreement. ‘That’s right.’
‘I only received one letter from you,’ Margaret said, ‘a couple of weeks after you left Folkestone. I can’t recall exactly what it said now, but I think it was full of teenage gushing. I thought I must have put you off.’
‘No, not at all. I thought you’d lost interest.’
Morton stood up and went to the chest of drawers behind him, where he had put the three letters in the eventuality that the subject might be discussed. He sat back down with the letters stacked on the table in front of him. ‘I don’t know what to do with them. You wrote them,’ he said to Jack. ‘But you posted them and someone intervened before they got to you, Aunty Margaret. So, I don’t know who they belong to now.’
Jack picked them up decisively. ‘They’re mine.’ Then he passed them over to Margaret. ‘And I give them—forty-four years late—to you, Margaret. Don’t worry, I’m not expecting a reply.’ He laughed.
She blushed, set down her cutlery, and took the proffered letters, holding them uncertainly, as though they might contain an incendiary device. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, staring for some time at the name and address: Margaret Farrier, 163 Canterbury Road, Folkestone, Kent. ‘I presume my father got to them first…’ Her words petered out and her eyes glazed slightly.
In that moment Morton would have given anything to know what was going on inside her mind, as she stared at the envelope on top; her face gave nothing at all away.
Finally, she lowered the letters to the table. ‘Shall I read them?’ she said quietly.
Jack shrugged. ‘They’re yours.’
Margaret pinched her lips together and nodded her head, seemingly having made up her mind. ‘I’ll read them later, in private, with a glass of sherry by that lovely big fire in the lounge at the Mermaid.’
‘More wine, down that end?’ Juliette called, as though they were seated at some grand banqueting table.
‘Yes, please,’ Morton answered, receiving a welcome flashback of his dream last night. Thankfully—so far at least—it had just been a nightmarish vision and not a premonition. Nobody had stood up to give a speech and the chances of his biological parents eloping together seemed reasonably far-fetched, now. One thing, though, which he did notice: Juliette was only drinking orange juice.
‘Are you having some?’ he said to her, as she passed him the wine bottle. She shook her head and screwed up her face, leaving Morton wondering if she might actually be pregnant.
He topped up Jack and Margaret’s drinks and watched again, as Juliette expertly stitched together the two halves of the table by bringing the focus to mutual ground: Grace’s birthday. She brought to the table a lion’s head cake with a lit candle in the shape of a number 1 and began to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’
Morton joined in the song, then sat back with his glass of wine a
nd allowed himself to indulge in holding on to this very moment. A moment without a past, with his mother, father, wife and daughter and the hope of many more occasions such as this.
He remembered his dream and smiled inwardly at the idea of standing up now and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The balance of stark inappropriateness would be weighted equally, he felt, against the pertinence of bringing to mind the rest of his family—his adoptive family—who had raised him and helped shape him into the man which he was today.
He didn’t stand up and sing, but he did raise a silent toast to the two people who, despite their deaths, he still called Mum and Dad.
Chapter Sixteen
8th May 1823, Boulogne, France
The tide was low and there were several hours still left until the waters would return to raise the fishing boat, Nancy, from her sandy grounding. The crew—experienced fishermen from Folkestone—had scarpered into the ancient city’s backstreets, spending their wages before they had been earned on whores, liquor and gambling. At the top of the beach, safely positioned above the highest of tides, was a small network of ramshackle huts which, Sam noticed, had grown exponentially in number since his first visit here. Outside of most of the huts were an assortment of men: a motley jumble of local French carpenters and Englishmen lured from their home parishes on the coast of Kent by the handsome profits to be reaped from the building of smugglers’ boats.
‘When the sea be a-coming for her, she be ready to go,’ the carpenter—Rummy was his nickname—declared with a snort. He had been their usual boat-builder for a while in Deal, but, as with many others of his occupation, he had shifted his home and business to Boulogne in response to the English customs laws, which prevented the building of boats greater than twenty-eight feet in length. Rummy was a gaunt wiry man with no perceptible teeth and suspicious over-blinking black eyes.
This newly crafted boat, which Sam now carefully examined, was thirty-eight feet in length, capable of holding two hundred barrels of contraband.
Rummy waited patiently, scratching feverishly into his tangled ginger beard. When Sam had finished the inspection, Rummy opened his right hand: ‘Forty pound.’
Sam raised his smock, revealing a leather purse hanging from around his neck. He took out the money and handed it over.
‘Happen this one be a-lasting you longer,’ Rummy said with a chuckle. ‘Not that I be a-caring, course!’
‘Hm,’ Sam answered, turning his back on the carpenter and walking towards the Capécure, the old harbour area. Despite knowing from experience that he had plenty of time before the tide would reach the boats, he marched purposefully to his destination: one of the many warehouses situated just behind the busy harbour.
The buildings—mostly grey and starchily disinclined to reveal the nature of their wares—grew larger as Sam neared the harbour district. He entered a narrow cobbled lane, devoid of sunlight, owing to the tall repositories on either side, all the time walking with a lurching step in order to avoid the unforgiving merchants in their horses and carts, and the generous dollops of fresh manure which rose up indiscriminately in small hillocks. The last building on the street was demarked only by the name, Delacroix painted in large white letters above the gaping doors. This was the entrepôt, a microcosm of the city itself, an intermediary place which united producer and exporter.
Inside the vast warehouse Sam briefly took in the scene, now much less impressive than on his first visit. At one end of the building were dozens of carts containing goods of every conceivable kind: wine from Nantes; gin from Schiedam; genever from Brussels; lace from Bruges; brandy from Andalusia; rum from the West Indies; tobacco from Virginia—all of it stored in barrels and crates now being worked by dozens of men with the ferocity of a colony of ants. They carried the goods to the other side of the warehouse, where they were stored temporarily—often for just a few minutes—before another group of workers at the opposing end of the warehouse loaded them onto empty carts ready for export.
The process was almost mechanical in its methodicalness and was overseen by the watchful eye of Madame Delacroix from her office situated high above the main depot.
Sam looked up and, with a quick nod of her head, she acknowledged him, before turning to speak with someone unseen behind her. On his first visit here, Sam had been shown to the office and introduced to her. She was a formidable widow with a harsh face and, if the translator were to have been believed, a harsh tongue to match. At that meeting, Sam had negotiated the terms of business and since then he had been dealt with by one of her English-speaking underlings, Monsieur Comtois, who arrived now wearing a midnight-blue coat, buckskin breeches, tall black boots and carrying his top hat. As he approached, he twitched his giant black moustache, as he was accustomed to doing, then said, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur. Welcome back.’ He quickly consulted the piece of paper in his hands. ‘Monsieur Ransley would like the same, yes?’
Sam nodded. ‘That be right, yes.’
‘Très bien. Your cart is ready. S’il vous plaît,’ he said, indicating that Sam should follow him. Close to the large exit doors, he was shown a cart laden with half-anker barrels, each containing three and three-quarter gallons of various types of liquor. Heaving himself up inside the cart, Sam quickly counted them: two hundred.
‘Bon,’ Monsieur Comtois said, slapping his hands together in a way which suggested that his time was precious and that he wanted the payment to wrap up the deal. ‘One hundred and thirty pounds.’
Sam pulled the purse from around his neck and counted the money into the outstretched hand of Monsieur Comtois, who promptly spirited it away into an inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Good day, Monsieur,’ Comtois said, shaking Sam’s hand, then, he called something in French to one of the workers and disappeared up the stairs.
Behind Sam, the workers were hitching the laden cart to a packhorse ready for the short journey to the beach.
The routine today was the same as it always had been: two French men incapable in English took the cart, with Sam in the back, to the boat where they would unload the contraband onto the sand before venturing wordlessly back to the warehouse. The men worked efficiently and had the cart emptied in minutes. Sam always felt the need to try and explain why he stood back, dumbly watching and not helping. The men rarely understood him until he showed the unsightly scars on his right shoulder with an accompanied mime of trying to lift his arm. Most gave an apathetic nod of the head so as to say that they had understood and did not really care.
With the cargo unloaded beside him, all Sam could do now was to wait for the return of the fishermen. He stood quietly, taking in long slow breaths of air, as he watched the sea edging slowly and reluctantly forwards. A dozen or more herring gulls swept overhead then came to a rowdy landing on the wet sand a short distance away, instantly tapping their yellow beaks on the surface at unseen creatures.
As time drew on, and his frequent glances at the city behind him continued in their failure to offer sight of the fishermen, so grew Sam’s agitation. The calmness of the water sluggishly creeping inward had been supplanted by a worsening anxiety at the sea growing greedily close towards the contraband and the new boat. He had half a mind to enter the city in search of the useless fishermen, but it would be an exhaustive search among the myriad brothels, inns and public houses. Besides which, the last thing that he could do was leave the cargo unattended, just minutes away from the foamy reaches of the high tide.
‘Looks like you be a-loading the boat single-handed,’ Rummy called, then heard the joke hidden within his own words: ‘Single-handed!’
Sam outwardly ignored him but inwardly he was thinking the same thing, that he would somehow have to load the boat by himself with only one fully functioning arm. He was certain that Rummy, standing facing him with a pipe hanging loosely from his mouth, would assist…for a price. But he only had the fishermen’s wages left. He looked grimly at Rummy, who had already determined what he was about to ask.
Rummy screwed his shrockled face into
a sort-of-smile and smacked his hands to his hips.
‘Oh! Those tarnal French!’
Sam turned to see the unruly group of fishermen tramping towards him. Noticing that Rummy had scarpered back inside his hut, Sam said nothing but glowered at the men, who, clearly intoxicated, were struggling to keep the pace of Tom Swain. Nancy belonged to him and, as such, he had assumed the unofficial role of their leader. They arrived with a fear of Sam, all breathless and reeking of a displeasing mixture of ale, old sweat and tobacco. One of the men, William, was standing embarrassedly in only his drawers and under-stockings, hopelessly trying to use Tom as a shield.
‘Those tarnal French,’ Tom repeated. ‘Moved and seduced by the devil hisself.’
‘What be the worry?’ Sam asked impatiently.
‘We been robbed blind, that be what,’ Tom answered. ‘Tooked everything—including young William’s trousers.’
‘What you be meaning is some artful folk tooked your money–’ with a look of contempt at William, ‘—and your trousers when you be in the brothel cavorting and ravishing with whores.’
The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7) Page 16
