by Winona Kent
On the other side of the garden wall she could see cobbled roads, whitewashed cottages, bow-windowed shop fronts, and in the distance, the familiar steeple of St. Eligius Church, with its clock.
Over the way was the Village Green with its spreading oak, two hundred years younger, comfortably familiar, and in excellent health.
There were villagers. The women were all wearing the same sort of frock that she was dressed in. The men were in clothing that she’d last seen on TV during a Jane Austen week.
There were horses. And carts.
This is, Charlie thought, most interestingly, most excitingly, most enticingly, and most wonderfully, peculiar.
But someone was coming. Four people, in fact: a woman and three children—two boys and a little girl.
Charlie ran back into the cottage. She closed the kitchen door behind her and fled to the relative safety of the sitting room.
Had they seen her?
The door was opening.
Charlie froze as the woman and her three children entered the kitchen.
Was this their home?
“I still do not understand,” one of the children was saying, “why we must learn how to sew buttons on things. Is it not an occupation more suited to Mary?”
“I believe in a well-rounded education for boys and for girls, Jack,” the woman replied, “And that is why Mary is learning Algebra and History.”
“I fail to see the point of it,” said the other boy. “No man in his right mind wants a wife who knows more than he does.”
“I am not going to be a wife,” the little girl reminded him.
“Yes you are,” said her brother. “What else can you be?”
“An old maid!” the other brother shouted, and the two boys laughed uproariously at his joke.
“I know as fact that the vicar’s sons have no desire to learn about buttons,” the first boy argued, as the little girl, unamused, ran into the sitting room and then stopped, abruptly.
“Who are you?” she said, curiously.
Charlie stuffed her mobile down the bosom of her frock. “I was about to ask you the same thing,” she replied, sensibly.
And she was still trying to formulate a reasonable, feasible, and perfectly logical explanation for her presence in their sitting room, when the woman walked through from the kitchen, and solved it all.
“My dear!” she exclaimed. “Children—I promised you a wonderful surprise this morning—and here she is! It is our cousin, Catherine Collins. She has come all the way from London to stay for a fortnight!”
It was not the optimal time for hunches. But Charlie now had a very good idea who this woman was, her face wreathed in smiles.
“Sarah?” she guessed.
“My dearest fondest cousin,” the woman replied, taking Charlie by the arm, leading her to a chair beside the fire. “It has been many years, I know—and you have changed much—as, indeed, have I! But how wonderful it is to see you again!”
Charlie couldn’t help herself. She was staring.
It was peculiar, reading about someone for ages and ages, researching them, digging up morsels of their history, and then suddenly being presented with the most unlikely opportunity of meeting them. In the flesh. And then stitching together the imagined person with the real.
Sarah Elizabeth Foster. Origins unknown. Died, aged 80, in 1873. Charlie had a colour photocopy of her death certificate. Married Louis Augustus Duran on July 30, 1825, which made her, on this day, thirty-two years old. A bit of an old maid, Charlie had always thought, since most women were spoken for by eighteen.
But this woman was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, her ancestor. She had Charlie’s nose and eyes. Unmistakably.
And Catherine Collins. The woman who had written the letter in the box in the Parish Council Office. A cousin? There was nobody named Collins in the documents she’d carefully researched and just as carefully noted down in the family history. How had she missed this?
And who did these three children belong to? Sarah? It was a month before she was due to marry. And years before Emily and Augustus would be born.
“Children,” Sarah said. “Come and be introduced to your cousin!”
The eldest boy stepped forward, and in a remarkably grown-up manner, said, “I am Tom, Mrs. Collins, and I am very pleased to make your acquaintance. Although I was very sorry to hear that your husband had died.”
“Thank you,” Charlie replied. Catherine was a widow, then. Piece of cake.
“And I am Jack,” said the middle one.
It was obvious all three belonged to Sarah. But why hadn’t they shown up somewhere in the family’s history? Charlie knew nothing about them. She had no point of reference from which to start. Census records only began in 1841, and by then, all three would have been grown up and married and had likely gone to live elsewhere.
“Pleased to meet you, Jack.”
“And this is Mary,” Sarah said. “My youngest.”
“Hello,” Charlie said, with a small wave.
“Have you got any children?” Mary asked.
“Mary,” Sarah said, “I’ve told you. Cousin Catherine has, alas, not been so blessed. Although…” And here, she turned slightly, to acknowledge Charlie. “That is not to say it may not yet happen, should circumstance avail itself of opportunity. Your period of mourning has passed, my dear cousin. A matrimonially-minded gentleman is not as difficult to locate as you may have convinced yourself.”
“But I don’t wish to be married again,” Charlie protested, truthfully.
“Nonsense,” Sarah replied, dismissing the very thought. “The last time you and I set eyes upon one another was at your wedding to Mr. Collins, in London. I do believe it was the most joyful and fulfilling moment of your life. His loss was tragic and premature. There will be another to make you whole again, I am certain.”
She turned back to Tom.
“Please take Cousin Catherine’s bags up to Mary’s room.”
Tom located two travelling cases Charlie had not noticed before, grasped their handles and dragged them to the stairs. He bumped them up to the cottage’s second floor, one at a time.
“Mary and Jack,” Sarah said. “Faces and hands. I should like them scrubbed, if you please.”
The two younger children disappeared into the kitchen.
“I must see to our supper,” Sarah said, over her shoulder, following them through the doorway, leaving Charlie alone in the sitting room to contemplate her ancestry.
If Jack, Tom and Mary belonged to Sarah…then where was their father? Who was their father? Louis Augustus Duran?
Charlie didn’t think it likely. Two centuries from now, having three children without benefit of marriage was commonplace. But in Sarah’s time? There were different social norms, and very specific rules of decorum and etiquette. Having a child on the way before marriage did happen, but the unmarried state of the couple was usually remedied before the infant’s birth.
Charlie glanced again at the open diary. The writing was plain but educated, the words carefully chosen, the script nearly perfect. It was clearly Sarah’s journal, and in it, she had been noting her thoughts.
It has been five years, she had written, since my beloved Aiden was cruelly taken from us. I am meant to have recovered from this dreadful misfortune. I am certain I have done so, in many ways, however there will always be an emptiness in my heart…
Mr. Foster.
Of course.
Sarah was a widow, too.
Her marriage banns, published on the three Sundays before her wedding to Louis Duran, had said nothing about her status. Nor his, for that matter. They could have been a Spinster and a Bachelor of This Parish. Or, just as easily, a Widow and Widower. It was usual for such things to be stated. But it was just as usual for the information to be missing.
And their actual certificate of marriage had been just as vague.
No wonder Charlie had been unable to discover anything about Sarah prior to her marriage to Mr. D
uran. She’d been looking for the wrong surname. Sarah had been called something else at birth.
Mary came back, her face shiny from washing.
“Mary,” Charlie said. “Show me how clever you are. What is the name of your grandfather?”
Mary frowned. “Grandfather,” she replied, with utmost seriousness.
“Excellent,” Charlie said.
There would be other opportunities.
“And can you tell me what happened to your own father?”
Mary’s face fell. “Father is not here anymore. He has gone to his great reward.”
Jack came through the doorway from the kitchen.
“She was a baby. And I cannot recall any of the circumstances. You must ask Tom.”
Tom clattered down the narrow little staircase. “Surely mother wrote to tell you? He was swept out to sea.”
Missing, then, and presumed dead. A widow by circumstance, if not by law.
“Thank you,” Charlie replied. “Of course she did. But I’m afraid the shock of losing my own husband has done some very peculiar things to my memory.”
“Come and sit down!” Sarah called, through the doorway.
Charlie followed the three Foster children—the siblings of their yet-to-be-born half-brother, Augustus, who was Charlie’s ancestor—into the kitchen for supper.
Chapter 5
Nick’s pragmatic mind was not altogether accepting of what he had just witnessed. He had seen it with his own eyes, so it was not imagined. His fingers had plunged through a gelatinous substance. He had touched it, felt it. It did exist.
And it seemed to him that in that moment when the substance had surged forward, sucking his fingers in, Charlie had disappeared. Gone…dissolved, like a frame in a film, transitioning from one scene to another. And then, in the next moment, undissolved. Back…but with a very confused look on her face.
“Charlie!” Nick said. “Are you all right?”
Behind him, Kevin had beaten Ron Ferryman through the doorway from the kitchen. “Mrs. Lowe,” he said. “PC Smith.”
“And we’re here to make damned sure you pay for every bit of damage you caused,” Ron added, entering the room at last.
“I beg your forgiveness,” said the woman standing before them, “but I am not acquainted with Charlie. Who might he be?”
“Very clever,” Ron laughed. “Feigned amnesia. I think not.”
Kevin cleared his throat importantly. “Mrs. Lowe. Where were you at approximately six o’clock this evening?”
“You are much mistaken, sir. I am not Mrs. Lowe. I am Mrs. Collins, and I have this afternoon arrived by coach from London to visit my cousin, Mrs. Foster. She will be here at any moment.”
Nick decided to play along.
“Mrs. Sarah Foster?” he inquired.
“Indeed, the same. This is her cottage. But surely this must be common knowledge…?”
“Can’t you just arrest her?” Ron said. “I’m late for dinner.”
“My name,” said Nick, “is Nicholas Weller. I am, in fact, a distant cousin of Mrs. Foster’s, and because of this, you and I must also be related. Though it would take me some time to work out the lineage. Pleased to meet you.”
“As am I,” Mrs. Collins replied. “Although the circumstances are undeniably odd. Perhaps it is just my mind, fatigued from the journey, which was lengthy and hot, and very much delayed.”
“I think,” Nick said, turning to Ron and Kevin, “that your questions might have to wait a day or two. She’s clearly not altogether there. Or here. Tell you what. I’ll make sure she doesn’t skip the country if you’ll agree to putting your interrogation on hold until she’s in a more…lucid state.”
Ron was showing every sign of imminent internal combustion, but Kevin seemed relieved. “It’s all right with me,” he said. “As luck would have it, I’ve got a very nice dinner date waiting as well. After you, Ferryman.”
“Bollocks,” Ron replied, bad-temperedly, but Kevin gave him a poke with his baton, and he departed, with very bad grace.
Which left Nick alone with Mrs. Collins, who was attempting to apply logic to what she had just experienced.
“At one instance,” she said, her brow furrowing, “I was standing in my dear cousin’s sitting room, awaiting her arrival from the vicarage. And at the next, something altogether unexpected occurred…a not unpleasant sensation, somewhat similar to being showered by warm water and then wrapped in a cosy towel heated by the fire. A fleeting embrace. And then…”
She looked up at Nick.
“Gone.”
“And here you are,” Nick replied.
“And here I am,” Mrs. Collins echoed, looking around. “Although I am certain I am still standing in my dear cousin’s sitting room, it seems, somehow, altered. Indeed, it is altered. Very much so.”
She returned her attention to Nick, and his bold Hawaiian shirt.
“And what a curious costume you are wearing.”
Nick had his mobile out. He dialed a number.
“Sam!” he said, into the handset. “Can you come over to Charlie’s cottage? Yes, now…very much now, if you can manage it. I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.”
By the time Samantha Palmer arrived, Charlie’s demeanor had descended into something verging on distraught. Accepting Nick’s ministrations of comfort, including a cup of warm milky tea and a cold flannel compress, she had sought refuge in a large overstuffed armchair. She was sitting there now, with a look of befuddlement on her face that reminded Nick of old Emmy Cooper after she’d been found wandering across the Village Green at three o’clock one morning, wearing only a cotton nightgown, a straw sunhat and green Wellington boots.
Nick went through to the kitchen to answer Sam’s knock on the door.
“You’ve dragged me away from a mess that had every intention of becoming Fettuccine Alfredo,” Sam said. “What’s up?”
“Come and see,” Nick suggested. “And keep an open mind.”
Sam followed him into the sitting room. “Hello, Charlie.”
“I am not Charlie,” Mrs. Collins replied. “I am Mrs. Collins. I have come from London. And I wish only to see my cousin, Mrs. Foster. What can be keeping her?”
Sam took a moment to organize her thoughts.
“Mrs. Collins,” she repeated.
“The same.”
“And you don’t recognize me?”
“How might I recognize you?” Mrs. Collins said. “I have only just arrived.”
“Dissociative disorder,” Sam said, quickly, to Nick. “Some sort of trauma. She hasn’t hit her head, has she?”
“Not as far as I know,” Nick replied.
“Have you fallen down?” Sam inquired, using the same tone of voice she usually reserved for the elderly and hard of hearing.
“I have not,” Mrs. Collins replied, pulling away as Sam attempted to conduct a quick physical examination of her head. “What are you doing?”
“I’m a District Nurse,” Sam said. “I’m looking for bumps. Signs of bruising. I’d like to take you to the hospital so they can check you over. Just to make sure everything’s all right in there.”
“The hospital?” Mrs. Collins answered, haltingly. “But I am not ill…”
“Just to make sure,” Sam coaxed. “Would you like to change out of your museum frock and into something more comfortable?”
Mrs. Collins considered her gown, and then the place where she had been standing when Nick had discovered her.
“I am quite comfortable, thank you. I had my bags brought to the cottage by a boy from the inn…but I do not see them now.”
Again, she looked befuddled.
“Where have they gone?”
“Let me take you upstairs,” Sam suggested. “We’ll have a peek in your—Charlie’s—cupboard. I’m sure there’s something there that’ll fit you.”
Nick was waiting on the pavement beside Sam’s Honda Civic. He’d resisted the impulse to sit on the hood, lounging instead against the
passenger door, arms folded, as Sam and Mrs. Collins, still wearing her museum frock, emerged from the cottage.
“I do not understand why you wish me to be disguised as a boy,” Mrs. Collins complained, as Sam threw an unimpressed look at Nick. “And as for the unnatural apparel you have suggested I should put on underneath…”
She stopped as she caught sight of Sam’s little Civic.
“What monstrous contraption is this?”
“This,” Sam replied, moving Nick aside and opening the passenger door, “will take us to the hospital.”
Mrs. Collins considered the car with a great deal of doubt.
“We shall walk,” she decided, gathering her shawl about her shoulders. “It is a pleasant enough evening. Although the air has an odour to it which I find both unfamiliar and an insult to my eyes and nose. I wish I had brought my lavender water. Mr. Weller, will you accompany us…?”
“We shall not walk,” Sam replied, taking Mrs. Collins by the arm and bundling her into the Civic’s back seat. “It’s six and a half miles. Get in, Nick.”
Mrs. Collins had spent the first part of the journey cowering in the back seat of Sam’s Civic, overwhelmed by the onslaught of 21st century life, most of which had come hurtling towards her as they’d sped along the main coastal road on their way to the hospital.
However, Nick observed, after having recovered her composure enough to recognize that neither he, nor Sam, were the least bit concerned, Mrs. Collins had concluded she was in no danger. And she was now offering a wide-eyed and nonstop commentary which reminded Nick, rather humorously, of his daughter Naomi, when she was four and a half.
“What is that?”
“A bus,” Nick provided.
“And that?”
“A lorry.”
“Goodness. How foul it smells. And those square boxes with windows?”
“Dwelling places. Quite expensive. With excellent views of the sea.”
“I should not like to live in one,” Mrs. Collins decided. “There are no chimneys. They must be exceptionally cold in the winter. And those tall posts with the glass globes?”
“Street lights.”
