The Suffragette's Secret: A Morton Farrier Short Story (The Forensic Genealogist Series)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  About the Author

  Nathan Dylan Goodwin was born and raised in Hastings, East Sussex. Schooled in the town, he then completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Radio, Film and Television, followed by a Master of Arts Degree in Creative Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University. A member of the Society of Authors, he has completed a number of successful local history books about Hastings, as well as other works of fiction in this series; other interests include reading, photography, running, skiing, travelling and of course, genealogy. He is a member of the Guild of One-Name Studies and the Society of Genealogists, as well as being a member of the Sussex Family History Group, the Norfolk Family History Society, the Kent Family History Society and the Hastings and Rother Family History Society, among others. He lives in Kent with his husband and son.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  nonfiction:

  Hastings at War 1939-1945

  Hastings Wartime Memories and Photographs

  Hastings & St Leonards Through Time

  Around Battle Through Time

  fiction:

  (The Forensic Genealogist series)

  Hiding the Past

  The Lost Ancestor

  The Orange Lilies – A Morton Farrier novella

  The America Ground

  The Spyglass File

  The Missing Man – A Morton Farrier novella

  The Suffragette’s Secret – A Morton Farrier short story

  The Suffragette’s Secret

  by

  Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  Copyright © Nathan Dylan Goodwin 2017

  Nathan Dylan Goodwin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where the names of real people have been used, they appear only as the author imagined them to be.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author. This story is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding, cover or other eformat, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  I would like to dedicate this short story to all my wonderful readers; your enthusiasm and keenness for Morton and his adventures is both humbling and motivating. Thank you.

  In particular, I should like to mention those whose regular witty interactions help to brighten my day:

  Connie Parrott, Karen Clark Cresswell and Gail Ann Pippin

  Chapter One

  15th March 2017, Wye, Kent

  Morton Farrier was pleased. He had found the grave. The effects of time and forty-seven years of passing seasons had tainted the headstone surprisingly little. Perhaps its remarkable condition was owing to its position within the protective lee of the church nave or perhaps it was owing to the permanence of the chosen material: deep burgundy marble. Crouching onto the freshly cut grass, he read the inscription: ‘In Memory of a dear husband and father Cecil W. Barwise, died 18th December 1958 aged 74. At rest. Also beloved wife and mother Grace Barwise, died 15th August 1970 aged 94. Reunited.’

  Morton pulled out his mobile and took several shots of the grave. ‘It’s here,’ he called out.

  ‘Brilliant,’ came the flat, sarcastic response.

  He grinned. ‘Come over and see.’

  With a grunt and a sigh, his heavily pregnant wife, Juliette heaved herself up from a bench on the church’s perimeter and ambled slowly towards him. ‘I’m freezing and miserable—this can’t be good for the baby,’ she moaned. She reached the grave and took a long breath in. ‘Cecil and Grace Barwise. Amazing. Can we go, now?’ she asked, rotating back towards the car.

  ‘Sure, let’s go and get a hot drink from…’ Morton started. His words faltered when he saw Juliette wince and reach down to her protruding belly. ‘What’s the matter?’

  She turned, lifted up her coat and revealed a dark stain travelling down the legs of her light-blue maternity jeans. ‘I think my waters have just broken,’ she said, her face contorting into a grimace. ‘I think the boy is on his way.’

  ‘But he’s two weeks early,’ Morton said.

  Juliette rubbed the sides of her stomach. ‘I don’t think Albert wants to wait any longer; I think I’m in labour.’

  ‘Is it hurting?’

  Juliette nodded. ‘Yes,’ she replied curtly. ‘We need to get to the Conquest—now.’

  ‘But…it’s thirty-odd miles away—we might not make it,’ Morton replied. ‘We need to go to the nearest maternity hospital.’

  Juliette looked horrified. ‘But my birth plan…’

  Morton shrugged. ‘I think the water birth, soothing music and dimmed lights have just gone out the window. Come on, let’s go—I’m not delivering Albert in a churchyard.’ He took Juliette’s arm and began back towards the car, all the while fumbling on his phone to locate the nearest hospital. ‘William Harvey.’

  ‘What?’ Juliette snapped, pausing to bend over as a spasm hit her abdomen.

  ‘The nearest maternity hospital—it’s not far away, thank God. Okay?’

  Juliette nodded, stood up and continued across the churchyard.

  Finally, they reached the car and Morton programmed the hospital’s location into the Satnav.

  ‘Think you need to put your foot down,’ Juliette gasped.

  ‘I’ll go as fast as I can,’ he answered, zipping out of the church car park.

  ‘Is it disrespectful for your waters to break on someone’s grave? Do you think Cecil and Grace Barwise will be offended?’ Juliette asked, a wry smile turning into a wince, as she clutched her stomach.

  ‘I doubt it; they’re your great grandparents.’

  Chapter Two

  Morton and Juliette, with one hand each clutching onto the handle of the baby car seat, passed through the exit of the William Harvey Hospital. The closing of the automatic doors behind them rocked them with reality. Simultaneously, they peered down at the tiny creature sleeping soundly between them.

  A bewildered grin crept onto Morton’s face. ‘Is that it?’ he asked, swivelling his head to look back at the hospital, half-expecting someone to come rushing out and to declare that a mistake had been made—that they weren’t anywhere near ready to venture out into the world unsupervised with a baby.

  ‘Yep, that’s it. It’s just the three of us now,’ Juliette confirmed with an uncertain smile on her face.

  ‘But…’ Morton began, looking back at the doors, shocked at the simplicity of their discharge. She had only given birth last night. Nobody had even asked if they were prepared. ‘How will we know what to do?’

  Juliette laughed. ‘A combination of instinct, advice from friends and relatives and the abundance of baby books we’ve got at home. Failing that, there’s always Google if things get really desperate.’

  ‘Right,’ Morton said, not liking the sound of any of those options. For someone who had spent most of his adult life resolutely vowing never to have children, he wasn’t sure his usually excellent instincts should be trusted. ‘Come on, let’s get it home.’

  ‘It?’ Juliette begged, as they crossed the car park. ‘That’s our child you’re referring to.’

  ‘What do
you want me to say?’ Morton asked. ‘Albert?’

  Juliette rolled her eyes. ‘No, obviously not.’

  Albert had emerged as the favourite name, following the twenty-week scan in which a nurse had said that she was ‘pretty sure’ that they were expecting a boy, but that she couldn’t be completely certain. A profusion of baby name books was subsequently dredged, resulting in a short list of five. Having decorated the nursery in various shades of blue, Morton and Juliette had begun to refer to the room and its contents as belonging to Albert. But now Albert didn’t quite fit the child to which Juliette had given birth. ‘It’s a girl!’ the midwife had declared, following a short labour. She couldn’t understand their baffled faces.

  ‘Are you… sure?’ Morton had pressed.

  ‘If, after twenty-two years in the job, there’s one thing I can safely say I can do well, it’s to tell the sex of a baby,’ she had answered.

  ‘Oh,’ Morton had responded.

  ‘It really isn’t that bad,’ the midwife had replied, her tone suggesting offence.

  ‘No, I know,’ Morton had begun, realising how his reaction was coming across. ‘I’m very happy—it’s just a surprise, is all.’

  The midwife had shrugged and left them alone with their new-born daughter.

  They reached the car and Morton carefully set the seat in place, the baby bedecked with an oversized pastel-blue knitted coat. Morton stared at his daughter, a surge of overwhelming pride moistening his eyes. ‘Alberta?’ he suggested, climbing into the driver’s seat.

  Juliette shot him an incredulous look.

  ‘We need to draw up a new short list,’ he said, starting the car.

  Juliette closed her eyes and tilted her head back into the headrest. ‘I can’t face it; you can do that,’ she muttered. ‘I need to rest.’

  Thirty-five minutes later, Morton, Juliette and the newest member of the Farrier family entered their home on Mermaid Street in Rye. It felt to Morton as though they had been absent for several weeks, rather than just two days.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ Juliette breathed, collapsing down into the welcome embrace of the sofa. ‘I’m sleeping. Wake me up in time for the child’s first birthday…’

  ‘I’d better start ringing around and letting everyone know the news,’ he said. The first person whom he wanted to tell was his newly discovered biological father, Jack. Pleasure and pride rose inside him at the thought of informing Jack that he was now a grandfather. Since meeting him for the first time in Boston last summer, they had spoken at least once a week on the phone and had met up once more when Jack had been in London on business. In recent weeks, as they shared the stories and memories from the past that had been denied them, their relationship had felt increasingly like that of a normal father and son. He’d felt guilty at first and would often find himself in a sombre mood following their phone conversations, feeling that he was somehow betraying the memory of his deceased adoptive dad. Long discussions with Juliette had helped and now he embraced the relationship and its accompanying feelings wholly.

  He picked up the phone and started a video call. When Jack answered, Morton held the phone above the baby. ‘Meet your new granddaughter,’ he announced.

  ‘Granddaughter?’ Jack questioned.

  ‘Long story.’

  With the baby asleep in the Moses basket—Albert’s Moses basket, Morton noted with a dry smile—and with Juliette curled into a ball under a blanket, he tiptoed up to his study.

  The only wall in the room not to be covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves was the wall upon which Morton would usually attach the paper trail of his current genealogical investigations. For the past week, he had been working on a special project: creating a book charting the lives of Juliette’s direct ancestors. He realised, now that he was looking at the complex pedigree charts fixed to the wall, that his idea of providing a fleshed-out account of several generations of her family was an enormous task and his hope of presenting it to her shortly after the birth was impossible now that Albert…the child had arrived two weeks prematurely. His daughter had evidently inherited her mother’s wilful nature.

  The name ‘Albert’ was written on a single sheet of paper attached to the bottom of the wall. Morton bent down, scribbled out the word, replaced it with ‘Miss Farrier’ and moved his eyes up the inverted-pyramid-like pedigree chart, the number of pieces of paper doubling with each new generation. At the very top of the wall were sixteen sheets. Some of them—place holders for ancestors as yet undiscovered—were blank. The others contained the names of his and Juliette’s great grandparents.

  Reaching up, Morton added the burial location of Grace Barwise—the current focus of his investigations. So far, all that he knew about her came from her birth, marriage and death certificates. Now, it was time to put some flesh onto her bones.

  Knowing from her birth certificate that she had been born in Brighton on 8th July 1876, Morton ran a search for her under her maiden name in the 1881 census. The only result to match his enquiry was at the top of the list: Grace Emmerson, inmate, born 1876, Brighton. He clicked to see the original image and a long list of children’s names appeared onscreen—residents of the Brighton Union Workhouse.

  Could it be her? he wondered, returning to the search results. After some time of scouring, amending his parameters and checking the results, he came to the sad conclusion that yes, it was Juliette’s great grandmother who had been living in the workhouse quite alone among strangers, aged four.

  He switched his focus to the 1891 census. Despite not knowing the circumstances of her time there, Morton was saddened to see that Grace—now aged 14—continued to be an inmate there. He printed the document and jumped forward another decade.

  He was relieved to see that by 1901 Grace had escaped the confines of the workhouse, being listed as a twenty-four-year-old unmarried domestic servant, employed by a large farming family by the name of Smith outside of Brighton. As Morton ran his eyes down the household, he spotted another familiar name among the servants: Cecil Barwise—the man who would later become Grace’s husband. Now Morton knew the likely place at which Juliette’s great grandparents had met. He smiled, printed the sheet out and moved on to the final census available to him: 1911.

  He found her easily, living in Brighton with three other women at Sea View, 13-14 Victoria Road. At least, once again, he thought that it was her. Her age was given as zero. Her birth place and her marital status, written in a different colour by a different person, were stated to be ‘unknown’. Her occupation—just like the other three women residing there—was ‘Militant Suffragette.’

  ‘Well,’ Morton said, grinning at the screen. Juliette and her mother weren’t the only headstrong women in their family after all, then. ‘How interesting.’ He wondered if being a militant suffragette might mean that she had been arrested for her protestations. He typed Grace’s name into Ancestry’s Suffragettes Arrested register—a document created in August 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War, when more than one thousand suffrage prisoners were granted amnesty in response to a suspension of militant activities. The search yielded one result, which Morton clicked. A scanned, ochre-coloured copy of the original record loaded onscreen. Grace’s name appeared with no identifying information.

  Emmerson, Grace

  Brighton 1/8/10 – 177.568

  Brighton 29/12/10– 183.189

  Bow Street 22/2/11 – 200.455

  Morton looked at the sheet, slightly baffled. This woman had evidently been arrested three times within six months. Even though there was no age, address or occupation given, he felt sure that the two references to Brighton indicated that the woman’s record in front of him probably was Juliette’s great grandmother—he just needed to prove it. The seemingly random collection of numbers at the end of each line was going to be the key.

  Logging on at The National Archives website, Morton entered the first of the three numbers, preceded by the letters HO. He made a note of a new reference number, which pointe
d to a Home Office document. Entering the other two numbers, he received similar references, the documents for which, he was disappointed to read, could only be seen by paying for a search to be conducted, or by visiting the archives in person. Now was not a good time to be scuttling off to The National Archives, he thought.

  He printed out the page and stuck it to the wall, then typed Grace’s name into FindmyPast’s newspaper collection. He grinned at the first result, headed Suffragette’s Violent Speeches. He clicked to read the report and, just as it loaded onscreen, his daughter, with impeccable timing, began to wail downstairs.

  Morton bounded down to the lounge. Juliette, her hair strung in every direction, was cradling the baby, trying to soothe her. Morton leant over and looked at her tiny pink face, screwed up and contorted through her screams. ‘Poor little Albert,’ Morton said, ‘maybe he’s hungry.’

  Juliette scowled at him.

  Chapter Three

  26th June 1910, Brighton, East Sussex

  Grace Emmerson gazed at the languid white smudges that blotted an otherwise perfect duck-egg-blue sky. Under her nightdress her stomach tingled with a tremor of nervousness that had been immediately present upon waking this morning. As she gazed out of her bedroom window, high on the fourth floor of the chunky Victorian house, she half-hoped that those flossy clouds might miraculously turn leaden and render today’s proposed meeting rained-off. But the day was ripening to be exactly as they had wished: bright and warm. Anyway, it was time for her to conquer the fear within. Otherwise, what would she be? The precise embodiment of the view that they were opposing: a weaker, diffident, second-class citizen.

  ‘Grace, we shall be leaving in thirty minutes,’ a voice called from the hallway. It was Minnie Turner.