Ether & Elephants

by Cindy Spencer Pape

  “Isn’t that considered normal for a barmaid in a university town?” Tom sipped his tea and watched the older man, looking for signs of fear, or lying. Most people didn’t know there were visual tics that could tip off a lie, if the person observing knew what to look for.

  Bartlett’s pupils didn’t dilate, and his eyes didn’t drift to the left or right. “Right enough, but she was doing a bit more than earning a coin on her back. Begging your pardon, miss.”

  Nell smiled gently. “It’s all right. Just tell us what we need to know. I promise not to have the vapors.”

  “Well, she was doing more than whoring. She started seducing the rich boys and threatening to tell their families what they done.” Bartlett’s lips formed into a thin line. “After that, none of us here wanted to hire her. Don’t want to bring that kind of trouble down on our establishments.”

  Tom grimaced. “Sounds like our Polly, all right. Any idea where she might have gone?”

  “If she didn’t want to give up the game, she might’ve just moved it,” Bartlett said. “Edinburgh, maybe, but I’d think Oxford, first. It’s a lot closer and they don’t talk so funny.”

  That tied in nicely with what they’d already learned.

  “One last thing, Mr. Bartlett.” Nell poured the publican more tea. “As far as we can tell, yours is the first establishment where Miss Berry, or Berrycloth, or Barclay, worked. Do you know anything about where she might have been before she worked for you the first time? Did she come with references?”

  “No.” Bartlett sipped his tea. “As it happens, I know where she came from. Her mother was a barmaid back in the day, name of Josie Sterling. Had a little cottage in a village not far from here. Knew her when I was a lad, till she married a butcher called Landers. It was her brought Poll to me the first time. Went by Landers, then, till she up and married that Barry-clow fellow.”

  Nell’s eyes flew wide. “Do you know for certain that she married?”

  Bartlett chortled. “Said she did. Not like I went to the church and saw it happen.”

  “Do you know which church?” Nell’s voice was soft and full of encouragement, but without a trace of compulsion. “And when was this?”

  Tom swallowed hard to keep from peppering the man with questions he probably couldn’t answer.

  “Nah,” Bartlett said. “Never cared. If you do, you might check the parish where her mum lives. I suppose it was ten, maybe eleven years ago now. Before the smoke and the masks, before we had a telephone, or even teletext.”

  That was a fairly detailed account of a date well before Tom had known Polly. Nell must realize it too. Her lower lip quivered. “Is it possible that Mrs. Landers is still living?”

  “Far as I know,” Bartlett said. “The butcher passed when Poll was just a girl. Josie started taking in sewing to make ends meet, but it was never much. That’s why the girl needed a job so bad.”

  Tom opened his mouth then closed it again. Nell was doing just fine on her own. She’d already found them more information than he’d done at the last four pubs, or in the past nine years for that matter.

  “Could you possibly give us Mrs. Landers’s direction?” She sipped her tea and smiled, as if this chat was as innocent as talking about the weather. “We truly need to find Polly, and her mother may well know where she is.”

  Bartlett scratched his head again and furrowed his brow.

  “We’d be ever so grateful,” Nell said. “Wouldn’t we, Tom?” Turning toward him, she mouthed, Pay the man.

  This time, Tom pulled a twenty-pound note, a small fortune to an average man, from his pocket and tucked it under his saucer on the table, making sure the older man had a good glimpse. “There might even be a reward from an interested party,” he said to no one in particular, “but if Mr. Bartlett can’t help, we’ll just keep looking. Come along, Nell.” He stood, moving slowly enough to be stopped.

  “Village is called Gander,” Bartlett blurted. “Ask anyone for Mrs. Landers. She’s got a little cottage just off the High Street. If she’s not there, check the graveyard. Haven’t seen her in five years, so I can’t be sure she’s walking.”

  “Thank you so kindly,” Nell said, allowing Tom to assist her to her feet. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Bartlett. And quite a lovely pot of tea.”

  Bartlett bowed his head several times. “Thank you, miss. Sir.”

  Nell turned to Tom as they walked out into the late afternoon bustle. “The car, now?”

  “Right,” Tom said. “Time to take a gander at Gander, I believe.”

  Nell groaned, but kept up as he strode back to his steam car.

  * * *

  Gander wasn’t much different from any other small English village. There was an old stone church, not remarkably old or dramatically beautiful, just squat, stone and functional. The High Street was lined with two- and three-story Tudor buildings, and a neat, grassy square marked the center of the buildings. It wasn’t as full of black soot as London or even Cambridge, but it was foggy enough to warrant masks, unlike the villages near Hadrian Hall or Black Heath, which had adopted the use of air scrubbers in all their chimneys and smokestacks. Nell couldn’t wait for the day when Wink’s invention became universally employed throughout the realm. She hated breathing masks, even the miniature ones Wink had developed for ladies, but as a singer, she would never risk her voice by going without one.

  Tom pulled the car to a stop in front of the village pub. “I’ll go in and ask, unless you’d rather?”

  “Go ahead.” So, he was in a snit about her getting the information from Bartlett. Even raised by Merrick and Caro, he was a man in a man’s world. Why did it have to be so hard for him to accept help from a woman? Perhaps it was just her. He didn’t want to be bested by sweet, helpless, useless Nell.

  She was done being the family mouse. Being demure had never gotten her anywhere. It was time to be her own woman.

  Tom returned to the car, pale and nearly quivering with tension. “She’s alive. Her cottage is just a few blocks from here.”

  “You want to walk or drive?” The walk would give him time to channel that nervous energy building inside him at the thought of meeting his possible mother-in-law.

  “Let’s walk.”

  Nell had already let herself out of the car.

  Tom caught up to her in a few quick strides, before she’d had the chance to turn one way or the other in front of the pub. “Left.” He took her arm and steered her in that direction. “I can’t believe we never found her mother before. I swear, I thought I’d investigated as thoroughly as possible.”

  “Perhaps the time just wasn’t right.” She’d wondered much the same, but in the past few days had begun to take a more fatalistic point of view. “But also, you didn’t have as many different sources of information then. It’s where those paths cross that we found the clues pointing us here. Without Wink’s engines, without Professor Wiggins, without knowing about the prince—” she dropped her voice to a whisper on the last word “—we’d never have come to the conclusions we did.”

  “I could have checked with the other publicans. In fact, I swear I did.” His walk was stilted, letting her know how hard it was to slow himself to her pace. Too bad. He could suffer. She wasn’t ill-bred enough to run on a public street and she wasn’t feeling that sympathetic toward him.

  She wasn’t totally without heart so she squeezed his arm. “I’m sure you did. And they may have given different answers back then, especially to a young man, unaccompanied.” She gazed around, taking in as many details as she could of the street. It was a poor one, but not filthy like the ones in Wapping. This was genteel poverty. Polly hadn’t likely needed to whore or steal to keep a roof over her head or food on the table. “There’s no use fretting about it now. The real concern isn’t about you, anyway. You made your bed. We’re here investigating abducted children and a possible threat to the crown. Don’t forget it.”

  “Of course.” He didn’t speak again until he rapped on the d
oor of one of the smallest cottages and a thin, pale woman with tired eyes and lanky gray hair opened the door. “Mrs. Landers?”

  The woman studied Tom and Nell with a gaze that was sharp despite her careworn appearance. “Who wants to know?”

  “My name is Sir Thomas Devere—”

  “He’s—we’re—from Whitehall,” Nell interrupted. “And we need to ask you some questions.” Mrs. Landers had the look of a woman who recognized two things—authority and money. Fortunately Nell and Tom were equipped with both.

  Landers’s eyes widened. “Oy. I guess you’d better come in.” She stepped back and held open the door. “I’d offer you tea, but I’m fresh out.”

  “Not to worry, ma’am. We’ve only just eaten.” Tom had apparently decided to take the role of the kindly official, leaving the dirty work to Nell.

  She gave a snide little smile, in keeping with the snooty civil servant persona. In this instance, that suited her just fine. She looked around the room and sniffed. “May we sit down, at least?”

  “Right.” Landers brushed off a couple of chairs at her small table in front of a coal fire and plopped down into a third. “What’s this all about?”

  “We have some questions about your daughter.” Tom smiled kindly again. “Polly Berrycloth is your daughter, is she not?”

  Landers snorted. “I suppose, if that’s her name now. Polly, Paula, Pauline, even Apollonia.” She said the last with a sneering attempt at an upper-class accent. “She was born plain Mary Landers, but her dad called her Poll. She was maybe ten when she stopped answering to the other altogether and started making up la-di-dah monikers for herself. Always said she was going places. I figured she’d wind up in a high-class whorehouse, but she married that no-good Mr. Berrycloth.”

  “What can you tell us about Mr. Berrycloth?” In her role as stern inquisitor, Nell snapped the question. She pulled a small notepad and a silver pencil from her handbag and poised herself to take notes. “To start with, what was his given name?” The man who witnessed Tom’s marriage had signed Alfred Barrowclough.

  “Algernon,” Mrs. Landers said with a sniff. “Never Algie nor Al, always Algernon.” Again she mimicked an educated drawl. “Met him in the tavern, fleecing other men with card tricks, but he acted as though his shit didn’t stink. Polly fell for him like a ton of bricks. He was going to lift her out of poverty, she said, though I didn’t see how. For all his grand ideas and schemes, for all he was supposedly some highfaluting scientist, far as I could see, he was nothing but a two-bit trickster. Never had a farthing to his name.”

  Nell’s gaze flew upward to meet Tom’s. His jaw was taught and his cheeks were pale. This was it. They definitely had their man. She coughed to keep her voice from catching. “Mrs. Landers, do you know whether they were legally wed? And if so, when?”

  “Aye, it were legal enough. Reverend Corbin never broke a law or commandment in his stuffy old life.” Polly’s mother scrunched up her nose and scratched the tip. “Right about 1853, I suppose. She’d’ve been sixteen, where he was closer to thirty-five. Always figured she were knocked up, but if she were, she got rid of it. Never had a baby that I knew about, except that poor little one who died.”

  “Good heavens,” Nell whispered while Tom swallowed convulsively. Tom was unmarried. Polly definitely had been wed to Berrycloth when she went through all those other ceremonies, including the one with Tom.

  All of the years of heartache, for Tom and her, the complete and utter destruction of all her girlhood hopes and dreams, had been for nothing. Nausea curdled in her stomach.

  “What church did she marry in?” Tom’s voice was stretched thin with the effort it must have taken him to maintain control. “Is the reverend living?”

  “Right here in Gander.” Mrs. Landers snorted. “Back in those days, she came around, still pretended to give a damn about her old mum. Reverend Corbin, he’d baptized her, and she wanted him to see her wed. I think she just wanted to show off to the whole village what a flash cove she’d landed. No expenses spared. He must have had a run of luck.”

  “And the vicar?” Having found out most of what they’d come for, Nell dropped her stern façade and prodded gently. “Is he still alive?”

  Landers harrumphed. “Nah. Died two, three years ago. But his nephew was the curate, and he has the living now. He might remember. Had a thing for Poll himself, just like half the men in Gander.”

  Nell sensed Tom’s anxiousness to leave, but she had a few more questions. “Mrs. Landers, do you happen to have a photograph of Mr. Berrycloth?”

  “Aye.” She jerked a thumb at a shelf where a wedding portrait was half buried under scraps of cloth. “Spared no expense, like I said.”

  “May we take that with us?” This time, Nell let a little resonance into her voice. It wasn’t quite compulsion, but she’d learned it was a persuasive quality. “We’ll make sure you get it back, but it could help us catch Mr. Berrycloth before he commits any further crimes.”

  “Wouldn’t mind selling it, if it came to that. Sewing don’t pay what it used to.” The older woman shot a wink at Tom.

  “I think I can manage a few quid.” He winked back, though his skin was sallow and drawn. “The baby that died, when was that? Boy or girl?”

  “Hmm. Got a picture of him, too. Might be worth a couple more quid, eh?” Landers began to rifle though the stack of odds and ends on the shelf behind her. “Here it is. Little Charlemagne Berrycloth, though Poll called him Charlie. Hell of a moniker for a little one, ain’t it? Born April first, 1855. Big lad. Weighed a good ten pounds. Poll and that bastard fair doted on him till he got sick and lost his sight before he died. That’s the last I saw of her, when they came here to tell me he was dead. Only four years old, poor chap.”

  There was the final confirmation they’d needed. Tom pulled a handful of banknotes from his pocket. “I’ll see you get the photographs returned, Mrs. Landers. Thank you so much for your help. What did you say was the name of the new vicar?”

  “Elgin Rook. Rectory is right next to the church.” She stared at the small fortune in her hands, barely looking up as they left the tiny house.

  Neither Tom nor Nell spoke a word until they were back in the relative privacy of the car. Nell held the two precious photographs in her gloved hands. “Let’s go get the church record, then get back to London as quickly as possible.”

  “You go talk to the vicar.” Tom’s hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t seem to start the car. “I’ll walk up to the pub and telephone Wink. With what we know now, she might have the records in her database.”

  Nell couldn’t argue. If he was delegating such an important task, he must be in rough shape. “Whatever you say, Tommy.” She winced. It had been years since she called him that.

  “Thanks, Nelly.” He let out a long, shaky breath. “The boy isn’t mine.” His voice held a blend of relief and regret, not the elation a more callous man might have felt.

  “No.” Nell was none too sure of her own feelings, either. “If he was born in April, he’d have to have been a seven-month baby, and he wouldn’t have weighed ten pounds, would he?”

  “I don’t think so, though I never paid much attention to those kinds of details with the littles. How much did Will weigh? I don’t think it was that much.”

  “Seven and a half.” Nell had relished her role as mother’s helper when her younger siblings had been born, back when she’d first imagined having babies herself one day. Will being the only boy, she could see why Tom asked about him, even though it didn’t matter much at that age. “Rose was close to eight, and she was the biggest. And none of them were so much as a week early.”

  “No chance.” Tom shuddered. “All these years, never knowing. And yet he did have a father and a mother, and from the sound of it, they’re alive. How could they have abandoned him, Nell? What kind of monster could do that?”

  “I don’t know, dear heart.” Nell swallowed the lump in her throat. “Jamie’s aunt and uncle threw him into
the streets because of his visions. None of my mother’s customers made any effort to prevent leaving behind a child. Some people are just…damaged inside. It sounds like they loved Charlie until he became ill and blind, then they discarded him like a broken toy. Something must have made them want him back. I only hope that if they used him for that horrible experiment, his passing was swift. He was a beautiful boy.”

  Right there in the car on the side of the lane, she broke into gut-wrenching sobs, clutching the photograph of him as a smiling infant to her breast. Her poor, poor Charlie.

  Tom folded her in his arms, awkward though the small confines of the car made the embrace. “Remember,” he said, his voice thick and suspiciously raspy, “our sources say a couple with a boy boarded the ship for India. Why would they take a boy who wasn’t their son? We’ll find him, Nelly. I swear on my life, we’ll find him.”

  “You’re right,” she said after the racking sobs had finished. “We have to try, at any rate. I have to know what happened, even if it’s the worst.”

  “That’s my girl.” He rubbed the top of her head with his knuckles, completely disarranging her hat and hair. “Let’s go see the vicar, then we’ll go together to the pub. We can phone Wink and catch a meal in one go.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat.” She pulled out her handkerchief and began to scrub at her face. Thank heavens she hadn’t been wearing any cosmetics, or she’d look like a badger.

  He handed her a second handkerchief, this one dampened with a bit of cool tea from the flask she’d packed that morning. “We’re probably leaving for India on the morning flight. You need to keep up your strength, love, if you want to be of any use to your Charlie.”

  “Brute.” She pressed the tea-infused cloth to her closed eyes. “But you’re right and I’ll forgive you, because this feels divine.”

  He accepted the used handkerchief and tossed it behind the seat to be dealt with later. “A trick I learned from Aunt Dorothy, though she used it for tired and strained eyes rather than teary ones.”