An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  “Is it the case that the two of you are engaged?” Darling asked.

  “I wish we were. Our parents like to think we are. But she’s pretty independent. Keeps telling me she’ll get engaged when she’s good and ready. I know it sounds bad, us going off like that to a cabin. But we don’t, you know, do anything. It wouldn’t feel right unless we were engaged. I guess we go there to be on our own, pretend it’s just us in the world.”

  “Well, unfortunately we are going to have to retrieve her. You’d better tell me where this place is,” Darling said, unfolding himself from the bench.

  “Oh my God,” Hedley said, distressed. “Do you have to? If I tell you she’s perfectly safe? She has some food and everything. I’ll try to talk her back.”

  “She’s a minor, Mr. Hedley. She’s gone missing and furthermore has broken into someone else’s house, which is still against the law. Now, where is this place?”

  “She’s going to kill me. That’ll be it for me. God, I wish her parents were more understanding. They don’t want her to go away to school. She’s a bloody genius. She’s the smartest girl at the school. I met her just before I graduated a couple of years ago. I think she liked me because I had dreams of getting away too, but my dad got sick and can’t work, so it’s up to me now.”

  “You’ve shown remarkably poor judgement, for a man who is the main breadwinner in a household. If anything is amiss with her, you are likely to end up in jail. You’ll have a hard time getting a job with a record, I expect,” Darling commented mildly. Ames glanced up from his notes at the young man. His evident distress was pitiable. Darling was really turning the screws.

  “Oh my God,” Hedley groaned. “I didn’t think . . .”

  “No, indeed,” Darling said. “So where is this place?”

  “There’s this wharf about three miles past Balfour where one of the steamboats docks. It’s on a bay. There are a few summer cottages along the waterfront, and it’s the one nearest that wharf. We discovered it when we drove down to look at the lake. There is a little path from there through the bushes. The door wasn’t locked so we went in. We didn’t mean any harm. We never took anything. She’s there. I was supposed to bring her some food and stuff after work today.”

  “I’ll save you the drive,” Darling said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE WOOD STOVE IN THE Armstrongs’ sitting room had dispelled the damp, and Lane and Kenny now sat on chairs looking again at the row of photographs, which were arrayed on the floor in an order Kenny had chosen. Lane was making notes in her notebook. She had been unable to reach Darling and thought she would like to go back and look more closely at the photos the Armstrongs had. She wasn’t sure why, except that she was trying to build up as complete a picture as she could of what life was like in the early pioneering days of the Cove.

  The photo that now held their interest was of a group of children gathered outside the schoolhouse on a summer day. Lane leaned over, picked up the photograph, and thought how charming it was. The children were smiling, standing at attention, looking as if they’d been told to stand still but could not quite repress their jovial spirits. In fading ink on the back, the words “King’s Cove, 1902” were written, but no children in the picture were named.

  “My mother took this,” Kenny said. “She was very fond of her apparatus. Too bad she didn’t think to name people in her photographs.”

  “Well, who can you identify now?”

  “Everyone in this picture, but there’s others where I’m not sure. That’s me, obviously, and next to me is John, then Gwenny and Mabs are over here in front of John. Here’s Robin, and then these three little girls lived in the Bertollis’ place when it was just a log cabin without the fancy additions. This was taken before the youngest one drowned. Can’t remember quite what year that was . . . 1903? I know they left shortly afterward. And as I said, Sandy hadn’t been born yet.” Sandy was the son of the Mather family, who was serving time in a prison on the coast. The events surrounding his arrest were the source of the cold shoulder Mather gave her whenever they met.

  “Now what about the Anscomb family? There were lots of kiddies there,” Lane said, putting the photo back on the floor.

  “You know, there should be one more picture with those people. They came along . . . I don’t know, maybe in 1907, 1908? I can’t see it anywhere. Now, let’s see. Bob was in it and then his younger sister, Isabel. Pretty little thing, but a bit timorous, and Andrew was there as well. He was an outgoing kid, but he clung to Isabel. I remember thinking how odd that was. There was one younger child and a baby. I can’t remember him much at school. Joe, as I recall him being named, did come for a brief spell, but he was small and I had the impression there was something wrong with him. That family kept pretty much to themselves. Henry Anscomb, the dad, he did show himself at the hut at the wharf with his apples like the rest of the families, and he did come out to help build the cellar, but we never saw much of his missus. I seem to recall she was delicate as well. I wonder if she and the boy had the same ailment. Something inherited.”

  “Were they English as well?”

  “No. Now, I think they came out from the prairies somewhere. Manitoba, maybe? They just turned up one day, bag and baggage.”

  Lane made a note. “And what happened to them?”

  “Now, there’s something about that. Let me think. I know Bob, that older boy, left before the war by a couple of years at least. I suppose he didn’t see any future for himself here, but I honestly can’t recall when the rest of ’em left. Maybe they all left at once, or Bob went ahead to scout something out. I honestly can’t recall. Sorry. But no one has lived in that house since then. I don’t know why. Henry Anscomb couldn’t make a go of it, so maybe no one else could either. I don’t even know who owns it. Anyway, the only girl in that family was Isabel, and she was small, but she was probably seventeen or eighteen when they left here.”

  “It was the other place the house agent wanted to show me,” said Lane. “I didn’t even bother going into it. I’d made up my mind on your mother’s lovely house.” She had passed the house in the winter, on her way to the cabin on her snowshoes. It had been empty, but it did not have the forlorn look she now attributed to it, with a family coming and leaving after failing to make a living, or cope with the isolation, or whatever it was that caused families to give up and move on.

  “You said there was ‘something about that.’ Do you remember what?”

  Kenny sighed and shook his head. “See, this is where Eleanor would be chiding me pretty proper. Says I don’t see things that are right under my nose. I was young and busy with my own pursuits, I expect. I didn’t pay any attention to the gossip. Sorry. I can’t think of what little girl it could be. I mean, there’s the drowned girl, but I seem to remember a proper funeral. In fact she was practically the first King’s Cove resident we buried in that cemetery. The other two Chase girls left in one piece. I recall helping them get their gear down to the boat.”

  “I’ll try to get hold of Darling with what we have. He’ll have to follow up and see what became of these people. Or more likely he’ll get poor Ames to do it. Then I might plumb the depths of the Hughes next, and I may even go and see Mather. That should be fun!”

  “I bet. You’d better have a drink before you attempt it!”

  BACK IN HER house, Lane took some paper from beside her neglected typewriter and stacked it neatly on the kitchen table. She thought about starting a pot of coffee but recognized that for what it was: a delaying tactic. Something she’d perfected when she wasn’t quite sure how to start a project. Her notebook contained point-form notes, with scribbled details. She thought about the families coming and going. A timeline, she decided, starting at say, 1903, when a little girl in the Chase family drowned. And of course, she would do a map. She spread paper out and taped it down, ready to translate what she’d learned from the Armstrongs onto a map of the Cove. Being able to imagine exactly where people lived, how they moved from one pla
ce to another, helped her to visualize the distant world of the early settlement. It was a time when there were few roads, and goods and people travelled up and down the lake by steamboat. Local roads began at the lake, and moved up into the townsite connecting the main dwellings much as the roads did now, but some homesteads and cabins were possibly only reachable by trail or footpath. She drew in the now-familiar homes of the current residents: the Hughes, the Armstrongs, herself, Harris, the Mathers, the Bertollis, and Glenn Ponting in the cabin a little farther along the road toward Ainsworth. In addition to these houses she added three now-empty places: a cabin above Ponting’s that she had visited during the winter on her newly acquired snowshoes, a small cabin set at the very limits of the Cove against a steep rise of the mountain behind the Hughes house, and the empty house above the Bertollis.

  Writing “Circa 1910” boldly at the top, she began to write in the names of the families on her list. Lady Armstrong in her own house, along with her son and her nephew, Kenny Armstrong and Robin Harris. A lone man named Arthur Renshaw, who retired just after the Great War, occupied the post office. No children. The house currently occupied by Harris at the turnoff onto the Nelson road was empty, having been begun and then abandoned. It was subsequently purchased by the Armstrongs and taken over by Harris when he was in his late teens. He married prior to enlisting. No children. Lane had learned that Eleanor joined her husband from her nursing duties in France. She longed to know more about that. It sounded rather romantic. But for these purposes, she said to herself, just the facts required for the case. Eleanor’s family had been friends with the Armstrongs in the old country. She and Kenny had met when she came for a visit to Lady Armstrong in 1912. No children. Hughes: two daughters, both accounted for. Alice and Reginald Mather: one son, not born until after the war. In Ponting’s cabin, two brothers from Halifax, the Bartletts, exploring a mineral claim. No children. In the home above Angela Bertolli’s, there was a large family, the Anscombs. Here, Lane felt, was some promise. A baby, named, Kenny thought, Frank, a boy of perhaps eight named Joe, a boy of twelve, Andrew, a girl of fifteen or sixteen named Isabel, and a boy Kenny’s own age, eighteen. She underlined “Anscomb,” and continued. Some of the Anscombs had been part of the building party—the father, Henry, and the older son, Bob. At the Bertolli cabin nearby was a family with three girls. The unfortunate Chase family. He remembered the names of the girls from their brief time at the school. Emma, Mary, and Amanda. The youngest girl had fallen from the wharf and been caught under the steamboat mooring and drowned, and their father had signed up for the war and never returned.

  This had some promise as well. However, as far as the Armstrongs remembered, the drowned girl had been buried at the cemetery that lay between King’s Cove and Balfour. Kenny remembered going to the funeral. They left some time during the war, as the mother had been offered refuge at the home of her sister in town. They should be easy to trace. The cabin tucked up by the base of the mountain had no one in it that Kenny could remember.

  Lane looked at her map. Along the lake she sketched in four of the lakeside properties she had walked past. Kenny had little idea who might have lived in them, as they tended to be summer cottages exclusively. Their world of the homesteader and apple grower was another world from that of the summer cottagers. In any case, would a summer visitor unknown to any resident up the hill have carried a child to be buried in Gladys Hughes’ root cellar? Very unlikely. She would leave it to the police to sort out the lakeside cottages and their owners.

  She sat back and thought about what life here must have been like in 1910. Roads suitable for horses and carts only. Well, this wasn’t hard to imagine, as Harris still kept horses in spite of his ever-present, smoke-belching tractor, and Kenny had a newly retired horse, and both had carts that, in Harris’s case, were still used to haul apple boxes down to the shed to await the steam transport. She knew that there must have been local roads, but the main method of travel up and down the lake was still by boat. The road she took frequently into Nelson would have been nothing like what it was now, a wide two-way, gravel artery connecting all the communities along the lake. No electricity, no telephone, no popping into Nelson or Balfour to shop for the weekly groceries. But what about the other things she took for granted—access to a doctor, or the vicar, or indeed, the police for that matter?

  She tried to imagine something happening on one of these rudimentary farms. Someone gets hurt, burned, say, or cuts their foot with an axe. A child falls ill or falls into the washtub. What about a woman giving birth? She would have to ask Kenny, but she guessed that people tended to their own ills as best they could. She had always been robustly healthy, aside from an injury during a night drop-off during the war when she had broken her collarbone, and the usual bouts of gastric ills most people endured from time to time, but she was comforted to know that she could get on the phone to a doctor only an hour away in town if she needed to. She brushed aside her nightmares and bouts of anxiety as neurosis that would clear up with a disciplined effort of will.

  Relieved to live in the sparkling modern world of 1947, she got up and stretched. She wanted a break to let things settle in her head. She would go out and inspect her garden for likely places to plant some vegetables, and then go back in to refine the timeline. She would put it alongside the map, like an annotated margin. She would tackle Mather and Harris later on.

  London, November, 1902

  “Come on. Out with you. Out, out.” The landlord’s agent stood at the door, trying not to see the gaunt woman with her two children who, he knew, would begin to plead, and he wanted none of it. He hated this part of the job. But the woman was not pleading. She was weeping silently, taking in gasps of air, reaching for her son, who was three. The eight-year-old daughter, holding a bag filled with their few clothes and belongings, watched the agent in that wide-eyed way children have when they are frightened. The agent reached into his pocket and found a few pennies, which he gave to the little girl.

  “Go on, then. Out,” was all he said. He closed the door and locked it, and then turned firmly up the street, making a mental note to get the woman who cleaned for him to tidy the place up for the next tenant. A few doors down, he stopped and looked back. She was such a young woman. He had heard from one of the other women that she’d been in service and had been let go because of a baby. The little girl, he supposed.

  The father of the children had died of consumption from hanging about on the waterfront where he had tried to find work. He watched the still woman and the two children, the crowd surging ‘round them like a river. He knew that when he resumed his journey and then looked back, she would be gone.

  On the street, the woman looked, unseeing, at the passing throng. She had no thought about what she might do. Her son nestled into her arms and began to go to sleep.

  “Are we going to Pa?” asked the girl.

  “No, we’re not going to Pa,” her mother answered. “Your pa is dead.”

  “But, you said . . .”

  “Stop it. Stop it.” The woman was angry, near tears again.

  She seemed to make up her mind, and she turned up the street and began to walk firmly in the direction of London Bridge. The crowds near the bridge nearly swallowed the woman, and the little girl had to run, anxiety flooding her, to keep up.

  Instead of crossing the bridge, the woman went under it. The rank smell of the river lapping below them made the girl gag, and the wavering darkness frightened her so that she grabbed at her mother’s skirt. Her mother had stopped and was looking around. There was evidence of others living under the bridge: rags piled into what could be sleeping pallets, a metal cup, the smell of human waste. There was a sooty, half-dead bush that butted up against the beginning of the bridge deck. The mother made for it and put her son down on the dirt embankment. He looked around in newly wakeful puzzlement and then something in his mother’s face made him begin to whimper.

  “No. Shh, shh. Shush. It’s okay. I’ll be back in no time.” She
slid her hands down her skirt to wipe them and pulled her shawl more tidily around her. “You stay with him. Don’t leave him on his own, mind, for any reason. Do you understand?”

  The girl, nodded, feeling her heart beating almost painfully. “When will you come back?” she asked.

  “In no time, love. I’ll get some money, something to eat. I’ll find us a place to sleep. But I can’t do that and have you two along. Understand?” The mother kissed the little boy and turned, and then reconsidered and reached under her collar and pulled a chain over her head with a small gold locket. She put it in her daughter’s hand. “Here, you keep this. Hide it. I don’t want no one taking it off me. It’s all I got.” Then she struggled up the gravel bank to the pavement.

  The girl put the bundle of clothing under the bush and, looking nervously around, put the chain around her neck and tucked the locket under her dress. It was still warm from where it had lain against her mother’s breast. It made her feel safe. Her mother would be back later, and she had to look after things now. She took her brother’s hand and they went to stand at the edge of the river, away from the overhang of the bridge where it was dry and the smell was less pronounced. Sunshine reflected off the oily water. She picked up pebbles and threw them, scattering the oil slicks, making the colours dance outward. Her brother squatted down and collected tiny handfuls of pebbles and imitated his sister. The afternoon wore on and there was no sign of their mother. The girl was aching with hunger. She suddenly remembered the pennies she’d been given. There was a bakery up on the street somewhere. She was sure they had passed it.