An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  As she turned the corner toward Braybrook she was surprised to see a familiar RAF uniform. Dunn was just emerging from a pharmacy. She was certain he would not remember her, so she was prepared to hurry past, but he stopped.

  “Miss Winslow. How very well met.” He removed his cap and offered his hand. “We didn’t have an opportunity for a proper handshake the other night. You met with no more misadventures, I hope?”

  “No, thank you,” she eyed his uniform, “Fancy remembering me, Flight Lieutenant.”

  He smiled. “You’re not easy to forget. Where are you off to?”

  “I need to get away from the hubbub,” she said ruefully. “I’ve lied and said I have to buy stockings, but I’m going to sit in the park.”

  “May I join you?”

  “Yes, why not, provided you don’t smoke or talk nonsense.”

  They walked along the paths of the park, mostly empty, its trees clinging to the last of their leaves. It should be forlorn, but Lane felt a kind of quiet elation. He had turned her down flat at the pub, but now it was he who had asked. And no full-court press. If she had time to analyze it, she might have said she felt as if she were in safe hands. They had been talking about the crowds at the eateries at lunch, and the lack of decent food, when he asked, “Oxford? Cambridge? Or something more Bolshie . . . LSE, perhaps?”

  “Oxford. How did you know?”

  “I can spot an intelligent girl at a hundred paces. When did you come down?” They had come abreast of a bench, and as if in unconscious agreement they sat down.

  “Just before the start. I was lucky to get a job. It seems to be all hands on deck. It’s even rather novel working in a prison.” The “Scrubs” was Wormwood Scrubs, a Victorian prison that had been converted to government use at the start of the war.

  “I’m sure it’s much more pleasant without the prisoners. What do you do?”

  Here she looked across the stretch of green and gold and said, “A very minor job, I’m afraid. I do secretarial work. I taught myself to type in college so I could write my papers. It turned out to be of use to someone. I imagine you fly a plane.”

  “I do.”

  Lane looked at her watch. “Gosh, I’ve got to get back. I’d no idea we’d walked for so long.” She stood up.

  “Look, I don’t want to be too forward, but I’m off away tomorrow. Dinner tonight?” he asked.

  THEY CAME UP out of Hammersmith station and walked along King Street. It had become a familiar routine, this companionable walk along the dark street. She had her hands in her coat pockets, the right one fingering the most recent note he had sent her with instructions for a meeting. This one said, “Meet me at Leonards on Beak Street.” It made her inordinately happy. It was like a grown-up game of paper chase. This time when they were a block away from the house where she and Emily rented rooms, he gently slid his hand under her arm and stopped her, turning her toward him.

  “I’ve wanted to do this,” he said, drawing her toward him.

  She felt herself enveloped in his arms, felt his lips brush her cheek, find her mouth, felt herself fall completely. They stood in each other’s arms, a warm circle in the darkness in a world that encompassed only them. They would become lovers, she knew. It was something she had never imagined for herself and now relished with a secret joy.

  “You’re the first,” she said to him now. He looked down at her, his smile gently obscured in the darkness.

  “What, the first man to kiss you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I can’t believe that. Your dispatch technique must be better than I ever imagined.” He kissed her again.

  “I’ve generally found men to be immature or presumptuous. And I’m afraid a few of my college friends had to go down and marry in a hurry. I thought it a terrible waste for women’s education, to give up a university spot like that. They aren’t that easy to get, even in these modern times.”

  “Well, I’m honoured,” he said, holding her close, his chin resting on her hair. “Have you told anyone? About our dinners, I mean.”

  “No one,” she said happily. “I want to keep this all to myself. Emily is always trying to get me interested in these ghastly people. I keep pretending men don’t interest me.” She giggled at this.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he whispered. “Ever. Guileless and fresh.”

  Lane felt her heart expand, felt his desire, felt her own.

  They kissed again and then stopped when someone hurried past them on the pavement, hat pulled down and collar up against the cold. Military men and their girls were a common sight on the street. Most rooming houses strictly forbade the bringing-in of members of the opposite sex.

  “You won’t mind terribly, will you, if we don’t tell people? I don’t want it getting back to my command. They want us unentangled and undistracted when we fly.”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” she said. Imagine, she thought, all the girls gabbing about those hopeless boys they all fall for and me having Angus. “I shall be so smug when all the girls are fretting about their on-again off-again men.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  SHE THOUGHT NOW about Angus, about her own blinding naïveté. She could see now, with the distance of time, how he had known exactly what would appeal to her. How she had ignored completely, had relished even, the implications of what he said that first night they’d kissed. She remembered it now.

  “That’s my girl.” She had wanted with all her being to be his girl. From then on he had somehow managed to define every aspect of their relationship, and she had thought herself lucky. She had thought herself in love. She had been in love, completely, the way young girls imagine love should be. And she had been utterly devastated when he died. Indeed, if she thought it through, she knew that the reason she had come out to Canada was because of her need to escape this terrible sense of loss. That young Lane seemed to her now to be a completely different person. A woman had too much to lose. Lane had had no experience of seeing love first-hand in her own home because her mother had died when they were very small children, and they lived with her forbidding father who disliked her and favoured her outgoing sister. Angus had been, she discovered quite recently, a master at deception. And look at that young girl Erin, resisting marriage with all her might. What example had her parents set? Or her uncle, with his repression of his wife’s career? The girl’s instincts were right, she thought. What experience had she had of a loving marriage between equals?

  There must be happy marriages, she thought. Kenny and Eleanor came to mind. A loving couple who did not repress each other in the least. And there was Angela and David. Theirs appeared to be a real partnership. They were each busy with their own concerns and only came together to tell the dogs to shut up or the children to come down out of the trees. She would like to see any man pushing either of those women around. And she knew, in her heart of hearts, that Darling loved her, though he might never say it, and she suspected she loved him.

  She knew he raged at her behaviour out of fear that one day she would take a risk too many, but she couldn’t bear it, that feeling that it might not stop there. How could he love her as an equal? How could any man? It was the way of the world.

  If you didn’t want to be alone, you accepted it. Why was she throwing up this massive wall of resistance? Was it her fear that she was not capable of seeing herself as an equal? She had let her wartime lover take command. She could not let anyone . . . Darling . . . determine her equality. Letting men be in charge was a bad habit.

  She became heartily sick of this unproductive rumination. She should go to bed. She wanted to get into town early and explain what had happened to her. She knew he’d hit her on the head and dragged her to that barn, and had threatened her with a bashing with that flashlight, but she also knew that somehow she never really believed he intended to kill her. He was troubled and angry, and perhaps had acted as he did because he simply didn’t know what to do with her. She susp
ected people without much imagination got into criminal trouble because they couldn’t think how to get out of things. In any case, he seemed driven by the question of the dead child. She uttered a rueful chuckle . . . she’d done most of the damage herself, falling down the stairs. She put down her glass and book, closed the stove, and hoped that she had earned a full and uninterrupted night of sleep. In the dark—gingerly snuggling into her blankets and watching the faint fluttering of her curtains as the cold night air cleaned away the cobwebs—she smiled. Of course she wouldn’t give up on love. She would start small, she decided. She would get a dog. But it was Darling she saw when she closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “MISS WINSLOW, COME IN. HOW are we doing today?” Ames seemed, as usual, to be full of youthful energy and optimism.

  “We are fine, thank you. A little sore, to be sure, but that is to be expected when one gets bonked on the head and falls down a flight of stairs. Have you spoken to the prisoner?”

  “No. His majesty is waiting for you. We’re trying to piece together the sequence of events. According to Manitoba, the family disappeared around 1907 or so after old Henry Anscomb was arrested and, for some reason, after he got away they never pursued the matter. We are also now dealing with the possibility that this Bob Anscomb is somehow implicated in his father’s death. Anyway, the boss wants you there because you’ve done some spadework at the Cove.” Ames registered Lane’s look of surprise. “I know. You never know what you’re going to get with him, do you?”

  Thinking that she ought to stop having uncharitable thoughts about the inspector, Lane followed Ames to the small room where interrogations were conducted. She looked around surreptitiously as she went in behind him. She herself had endured a fairly lengthy questioning the previous summer in this very room. She was pleased to be on the other side of the table. She sat where Ames indicated, and he took out his little book and pencil. In a few moments Darling came in with Bob Anscomb.

  Anscomb looked improved, she thought. He’d had a bath, had been given clean clothes from somewhere, and obviously had had a proper meal and a good night’s sleep. When he looked up and saw her he paused, frowning.

  “I’ve asked Miss Winslow to sit in, if you don’t mind. She has been helping us with this matter,” Darling said evenly.

  Anscomb made a noise that seemed to suggest resignation and sat at the chair that had been pulled out for him at the other side of the table. “Miss Winslow, by the way, seems disinclined to see you charged with kidnapping. I am not so sure. To deprive a person of her liberty for more than twenty hours seems to warrant a legal response. We will get to that. In the meantime we need to get at anything you can tell us about the young child who was buried in Mrs. Hughes’ garden, which you indicated yesterday you might help us with.”

  Anscomb sat, his hands folded on the table, his shoulders slumped forward. After what seemed an interminable interval, he said, “We was something called Home Children, me and Isabel and Andrew, and little Joseph.” Lane heard what she had not quite placed before in his speech. The way he pronounced “somfing.”

  “You’re a Londoner originally,” she said, and then glanced nervously at Darling. She was sure she was not meant to have a speaking role, but he merely nodded, as if this was more information to take in.

  “So all of you were Home Children?” Darling asked.

  “All except the baby. He was theirs.”

  “You took the family name. Were you adopted? Were Home Children adopted as a rule?”

  “No. We wasn’t adopted. But Henry, he insisted we take the name. I even had to change my first name. My name is Charlie Blake but he insisted on Bob. Robert is my middle name. I think Charlie was the name of that first kiddie who died, and he didn’t want to be reminded. Anyway, I kept using it. I don’t reckon Home Children were usually adopted. In the old country they take up poor, abandoned kids from the streets and send ’em out here to get a ‘better life.’ To work, more like. And sometimes people maybe do get a better life. I guess if I look back, I got a better life than I’d have had back home. I never had no parents, and I was stealing to eat. It wasn’t going to end well for me. But if I got a better life it was because I met Isabel and Andrew. Izzy’s mom left ’em one day when they was tykes and never came back. The officials wasn’t always too picky about whether children were actually orphans. I sometimes think their ma is still out there looking for them. We all got sent out here in 1906. We wasn’t together at first, but Isabel was with an old lady who said she was too young and she didn’t want a little boy to look after. Isabel would never be parted from her brother. I persuaded my family to take ’em. Anscombs seemed like good people, just . . . I don’t know. Unlucky. Turns out they had a child die on them through no fault of their own, as Henry told it. But Henry was a hard man. Wanted us to fit in, change the way we talk. We tried to sound like we belonged to them. He was never happy, always threatening to hit us or send us back. I never thought he could kill someone on purpose, though, but now I wonder.”

  “So wait,” interrupted Darling. “You’re saying you and Isabel and her brother weren’t adopted by the Anscombs, but that you met before you were shipped out.” He consulted his notes. “Your name is Charles Robert Blake. You aren’t actually blood siblings.”

  “I hope not!” he said, laughing mirthlessly. “We been married for thirty-five years. No. We met when we was kiddies, when they took us off the streets. I swore in my heart I would never leave them when I met them that night. I never seen nobody so frightened and lost, or being so brave about it.” Ames was scratching away on his notepad. He felt as if he was writing about another world.

  “So what about the boy we found?” he said, wanting to get away from his imagination of the misery of the streets of London.

  Blake, as Darling now thought of him, sat silently, looking down at his hands. “That was Joe.”

  Ames made notes. “Another brother of Isabel’s?”

  “No. Not poor Joe. I don’t know where he came from, but they was on the boat with us coming across. There was children from London, and maybe Leeds, on that boat. There was six of them in that family, and Joe was the littlest. The day we arrived on the train in Winnipeg I seen him with that big family of kiddies, and someone came and took them, and when they was all cleared out, they left that poor little thing behind. It was the worst thing I ever seen done, and I seen a lot when I was on the streets, believe me. So I took him, and he stayed with me in the boys’ home for a bit, and when I got placed with Anscomb, they wouldn’t let me take him. When I knew Anscomb had a plan to move away, I went to the boys’ home and said I were taking him on an outing and I never brought him back. I was afraid every minute they’d chase us and take him. But I don’t reckon anyone even tried. That shows how much they cared about them kids they took. I don’t even know if his family ever looked for him.

  “Isabel tried to contact the orphanage in London, and they sent her away with a flea in her ear. They won’t tell you nothing. I never even knew his last name. I told Anscomb he had to come too. I thought they’d kick up, because lots of people who came to pick up children that day seemed surprised to see such young children. They didn’t want ’em. An extra mouth to feed and you don’t get work out of them for a long time. I guess that’s why those other people left poor Joe.

  “Hard as he was, Henry let him stay with me, but he told me I’d have to work harder to feed him.”

  “So you turned up at King’s Cove in 1907,” Ames said, looking down at his notes.

  “I don’t understand why Anscomb agreed to take all of you. All those extra mouths to feed must be a burden if you’re trying to flee to a new place,” Darling said.

  “His wife was sickly. That’s Marla, and Izzy was strong, so she helped. Especially after, when Marla was going to have a baby. Even Andrew, little as he was, helped out. Henry got free labour, if you want to know the truth. He told me it was an accident with that other kid, Charlie, but they wouldn’t believe
him. They tried to say he beat him.”

  “Did he beat you or the other children?”

  “He lost his temper a lot. Hit me once with a board he was holding. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t feed the others if I tried to make my own way, and I couldn’t leave them behind with no one to look out for them. I made sure he never laid a hand on them. Anyway, he said it was an accident, and when you put young kids on machines and the like that they can’t handle, I guess you could call it that. I don’t see myself how it’s much different from outright murder.”

  Darling looked over at Ames, who raised an eyebrow. “People do claim all kinds of accidents to cover up beatings of children. And now we have the death of Joe Anscomb. Broken ribs, a blow to the head. Were you there to see what happened to him?”

  October, 1910

  “He ain’t well,” Marla said. Her voice was dry and exhausted, like the voice of a ghost. “He’s burning up. He’s going up in smoke. Like it’s his way of getting to God. I can’t do nothing.” She sat on the edge of the bed with a battered enamel bowl and a damp cloth held helplessly on her lap. Henry stood beside her, his chest constricted with fear.

  He watched Marla, desperately thin, her face, already lined with misery, now showing a terrifying resignation. The baby, who had been left to sleep in the kitchen, began to cry. Marla looked up at the sound, but did not move.

  “He’s going to be all right,” he said.

  “Why did you make him go get wood? He’s too small!”

  Henry made no answer. He seized the bowl of water and the rag, and knelt by the bed and began to tamp Joe’s forehead. “Go look after the baby,” he ordered.

  The boy was burning up, his breath coming in gasps. Henry soaked the cloth and wrung it out, but he knew it was hopeless.