The America Ground (The Forensic Genealogist Series Book 4)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

‘Thank you—they were very useful,’ Morton told Sally, as he handed over the wallets. ‘What time do you shut today?’

  ‘We close at four-thirty, so you’ve plenty of time,’ she grinned.

  ‘Great. I’m going to go out for some lunch, then pop back and look at your parish records, if that’s okay?’

  ‘By all means. Enjoy your break—the Rye Bay Kitchen’s nice—just around the corner on Robertson Street,’ she said, then called after him, ‘Lovely courgette cake!’

  ‘Thanks,’ Morton said, striding from the room and not quite liking the combination of the words cake and courgette.

  Outside was noisy and hot: rants from hard-hatted workmen bounced from the pavement to the top of a scaffolded neighbouring property; the repetitive beeping of a lorry trying to negotiate a delivery spot outside a health food shop echoed in the street adjacent; a crowd of teenagers devoid of all non-essential clothing surged raucously past the library entrance, forcing Morton to take a step back.

  He moved away from the library and slowly headed towards Robertson Street—named, he had learned from his research this morning, after Patrick Robertson, a wealthy London merchant who had leased the America Ground land from the Crown and developed roads of stylish and respectable Victorian buildings. His name had also been given to two other America Ground streets: Robertson Passage and Robertson Terrace.

  Morton walked the pedestrianised street slowly and deliberately, trying to assimilate his surroundings. He soon found the recommended Rye Bay Kitchen—a smart coffee shop bustling with outside seating, where he bought a take-out latte and a goat’s cheese panini—then continued his journey down Robertson Street. Using the map images taken on his phone, Morton navigated his way over the ghosted lands of the America Ground, stopping now and then to take photographs. He was surprised at how large the area was, now filled with an assortment of shops and businesses. It was now another world entirely from that inhabited by Eliza more than one hundred and eighty years ago; what was once a shanty-town of tumbledown properties was now four acres of prime real estate. He passed small independent cafés, hairdressers, estate agents, bars, newsagents and boutiques sitting alongside familiar large department stores.

  The latte and panini having been consumed, Morton turned right onto Harold Place—a road that formed the second arm of the triangular America Ground boundary. From his research, he had learned that the road now ran directly over the Priory Stream that had once formed the Eastern boundary with Hastings.

  Turning right onto Carlisle Parade, Morton wandered beside a crescent of substantial terraced properties, functioning as houses, B&Bs and hotels, until he reached the entrance to Robertson Street and was almost back to where he had started.

  He stared at Holy Trinity Church, a huge edifice dominating the three roads which triangulated around it. The building was old, but Morton guessed not old enough to have seen within its walls the baptisms, marriages or burials of the Lovekin family; a marble foundation stone dated 1858 confirmed his suspicions.

  A sudden yell from further down Robertson Street shifted his gaze from the church. Unable to locate the cause of the commotion from the busy street, Morton began to turn back towards the library when he suddenly noticed the huge mural emblazoned on the side of a building opposite the church. He grinned as he studied the enormous depiction of the America Ground painted red on a cream background, wondering how on earth he had not managed to spot it ever before. Under the title The America Ground was a flag combining the stars and stripes, the Union flag and the Hastings Corporation logo, which Morton guessed to be the ‘America Ground flag’ referred to in the newspaper article. Beneath that was a side-on view of how the area looked during its peak in the 1820s. A large ship’s hull, being used as a house, completed the image. He photographed it, then continued his way back to the library.

  Morton was faced with an unnecessarily challenging afternoon: when he returned to the local history shelving he found parish registers for nine local churches, all of them transcribed, none of them indexed. If only whoever had taken the time to copy the burial record for Eliza had bothered to say precisely which church it had come from, it would have saved him a lot of wasted time. Taking each book out and checking the time period covered, Morton ascertained that the oldest and nearest churches to the America Ground were St Clements Church and All Saints Church and it was there that he prioritised his searches.

  He carried the registers for All Saints Church to the table. His seat from the morning had been taken by an elderly gentleman with a magazine open in front of him, who was evidently having great difficulty in keeping his eyes open. Other spaces were taken at the tables by two women studying a large-scale map and a middle-aged lady diligently copying entries from a journal of some kind. Morton took the space to her left, acknowledging her with a smile and a nod of the head. Following a quick scribble of the nature of his search on his notepad, Morton delved into the burial register, skipping straight to 1827. He could tell immediately that it was not the same register from which Eliza’s burial had been copied. Still, he persisted through the next two registers containing baptisms and marriages for the church. His search took almost an hour and yielded nothing at all. Not one Lovekin.

  Morton scooped up the three books and returned them to the shelves, next retrieving the registers for St Clements Church.

  Taking the burial register first, he jumped to 1827. He was in luck—the burial ceremonies were performed by G. Matthews, the same vicar who had buried Eliza. Sure enough, he turned the pages and soon found her entry. Knowing that she had been buried in St Clements Church, Morton hoped that she had also married there and that it had possibly even been the place of her baptism.

  He worked through to the end of the volume, then began searching backwards in time from the date of Eliza’s burial. Very soon, he found another Lovekin.

  Name: Joseph Lovekin

  Abode: The Priory Ground

  When buried: 4th April 1827

  Age: 45

  By whom the Ceremony was performed: G. Matthews

  As with all the other burial ceremonies performed by G. Matthews, Joseph’s cause of death was helpfully appended: ‘Accidentally drowned.’

  Morton looked at the entry and considered its implications. Looking at his age at death, Joseph Lovekin was likely to have been either Eliza’s husband or, if she were unmarried, her brother.

  He drew a tenuous line from Eliza’s name to Joseph’s on his notepad.

  Beside him on the table, his phone lit up with the announcement of a text message from Juliette. ‘Be home late tonight—been called to a major incident!! Hope you’re enjoying your Bunny work! Xx’. Morton looked at the screen, hating the inherent danger in her job as a policewoman. Only Juliette could follow the words major incident with two exclamation marks. What was it? A fire? A train crash? An armed robbery? A terrorist attack? He needed not to think about it—to distract himself. He looked at the time on his phone: one hour exactly until closing.

  With renewed vigour, Morton began searching the St Clements Church marriage register.

  He worked through it, checking every name written on each entry, but time was running out. As he neared the end of the tome without success, he recalled from an account that he had read about the lawlessness of the America Ground, that many of the residents there lived in a state of concubinage. Were Eliza and Joseph living together without having first married? Or was Joseph not Eliza’s husband at all, but her brother or maybe her cousin? Morton wondered.

  Next, he scoured the general register for St Clements Church, which ran 1690-1812, running his finger carefully down the name column on each page, still hoping to find a baptism or marriage entry for Eliza.

  When the ledger had yielded him nothing, he looked at the clock, which seemed to be conspiring against him by stealing huge leaps of time between glances and leaving him just twelve minutes.

  As the effects of the caffeine waned, a despondent lethargy began to creep upon him; it was time to
call it a day. He had succeeded in locating the church of Eliza’s burial and found a potential husband for her.

  Time to go home.

  Chapter Four

  3rd February 1827, The Priory Ground, outside Hastings, Sussex

  The Priory Ground, outside Hastings: four acres of land, close to the abandoned Priory of the Augustinian order of Black Canons; donated by the sea and bestowed upon the town by a series of devastating storms in the thirteenth century, it lay dormant and desolate for four hundred years. Gradually, led by a group of rope-makers, this land was sliced into small parcels, upon which sprang a variety of homes and business concerns. Begrimed ramshackle wooden huts sat incongruously beside substantial buildings of stone and timber. By the mid-1820s, a complete community of close to two hundred properties had arisen, with more than a thousand people calling the Priory Ground their home: carpenters and cabinet-makers dwelt alongside mast-makers, millers and mariners; ostlers and brewers made neighbours among coachmen, labourers and butchers; tax collectors inhabited the same forsaken walkways and darkened alleys as those whose very existence there was to defy any kind of official duty. It was an unruly, raucous mixture of town and village, where a stranger might lose anything from his handkerchief to his life.

  It was to this nefarious spot in Southern England that there came, four Michaelmases ago, the Lovekin family: Joseph, his wife Eliza and their children, Harriet, Keziah and Ann. Joseph, for many years itinerant and with dubious employment history (extending from labouring to smuggling) had heard word of the opportunities presented by new land beyond the boundary and jurisdiction of the town of Hastings. Within a few short weeks of their arrival, he had taken advantage of the recent forty per cent reduction in spirit duty and established the first public house on the Priory Ground: a grand gin palace akin to those found in most English cities, whose origins could be traced back to the poor streets of the capital city. The edifice, which bore the name the Black Horse, stood out amongst the motley collection of buildings that surrounded it: a fine ornamental front, replete with pilasters, carved entablature and handsome cornicing. The doors and windows were glazed with large squares of plate glass and the building was fitted with costly oil lighting. Inside this gaudily decorated gin palace, which housed not a single chair or table, were to be found a roomful of working men and women who sought refuge from their gruelling and grim daily lives. Behind one long mahogany bar, Joseph and Eliza Lovekin plied their poor clientele with liquor from barrelheads named Old Tom, Cream of the Valley and Celebrated Butter Gin.

  Immediately adjacent to the Black Horse was a small, simple tenement of timber construction in which the Lovekin family resided. It was here, behind the street door and in total darkness, that Harriet Lovekin stood. At eighteen years of age, she was the eldest and easily the most attractive of the Lovekin girls, as she entered feminine maturity and began to shed the uncomfortable cloak of youth. Her doleful almond eyes had drawn admiration since the day she had been born and she had inherited her mother’s mousey hair, which hung in natural curls from a central parting. With the sharp grimace of anticipation imprinted on her face, she hurriedly pulled open the door. Cold air, into which was sewn the cacophonous muddle of intoxicated laughter, conversation and brawling, surged past her. She winced, quickly stepped from the house and closed the door, hoping to goodness that the sound had not disturbed her two younger sisters, whom she had left asleep upstairs in the bed that she shared with them. Harriet had waited discreetly by the parlour window for what had seemed like an eternity until the right moment had presented itself. Being the eldest of the Lovekin girls, Harriet was each night entrusted with the care of her two younger siblings. Most evenings Harriet would stay home, obediently feeding her sisters and then putting them to bed before sitting beside the fire diligently performing a suitable task such as sewing. Lately, however, as resentment of her confinement began to swell and mix with an increasing self-confidence, she had taken to sneaking out of the house once Keziah and Ann were asleep. Those first occasions had been swift giddy snatches of freedom that had set her heart racing. Gradually, they extended in time until they became the very thing that she longed for as she passed long days as her mother’s helper. ‘Certain sure—you ain’t be going out of an evening, my girl,’ her father had once warned her. ‘Ain’t no place for a young ’un to be around folk concerned in liquor.’ The reason the folk were concerned in liquor being solely down to her father, was not an argument that Harriet could raise with any success.

  She pulled her shawl up over her head and stole from the house purposely. She hoped that an air of sureness and certitude would mask the fears instilled by her mother and father of the dark lawlessness of the Priory Ground. With a fleeting glance up to her bedroom window, she made her way in the shadows of her neighbour’s weather-boarded cottages, down the dirt and shingle track to where the properties eventually gave way to the beach. Before turning to walk along the shoreline, Harriet twisted and took in the view; despite the apparent unruliness of the place, she found the site of the amber rush lights faintly flickering amongst the humble Priory Ground dwellings to be a pleasing sight. Had she not known the kinds of immoral goings-on there, she might have found it to be an almost romantic view. She carefully made her way along the stony beach edge, as the clamour from the Black Horse abated, replaced by the sound of the sea washing up noisily just yards away.

  The path continued up Cuckoo Hill—a large rocky outcrop that denoted the westerly boundary of the Priory Ground—and as she neared the top, Harriet slowed her pace, seeking her destination from the shadows; somewhere here was half of the rotting carcass of the brig Polymina. The boat had once been the dwelling of Widow Murdock until her demise, at which time it was stripped bare and hauled to the edge of the Priory Ground and left to decay slowly. She turned at the top and admired the view of hundreds of twinkling lights peeping out through the window shutters of the Priory Ground houses.

  ‘I didn’t think you was a-coming,’ a familiar voice echoed from inside the hulk.

  Harriet smiled. The voice came from her friend, Christopher Elphick. He was a sweet boy of seventeen, the son of one of Harriet’s mother’s friends, who had arrived on the Priory Ground just days after the Lovekins. ‘So sorry, Christopher—I be having a terrible time getting the girls to sleep. Anything out there tonight?’ she asked, tucking herself in beside him on a wooden bench that he had fashioned last summer from pieces of driftwood. From the darkness she could just make out his wild nest of brown hair, silhouetted against what little moonlight was cast over the sea. Although she couldn’t see it, she knew the features of his face just as she knew those of her own sisters. His plump cheeks, like those of a young baby, made him seem more boyish than others of his age. His piercing blue eyes were dark tonight, as he turned to face her.

  ‘Not so far. Awful light and bleat weather out there, though,’ he replied, tossing a woollen blanket over Harriet’s shoulders.

  Harriet shuffled up until she felt his warmth begin to creep through her clothing. Knowing that he had taken a special liking to her in recent weeks, she knew that she shouldn’t mislead him—but what harm did it do just to snuggle up and keep warm like this? It was how they had always behaved ever since they had first taken unofficial ownership of the hulk. The pair of them enjoyed gazing out to sea, watching passing sailing vessels battling against the unpredictable Sussex waters.

  ‘I were right about that vessel we watched two week ago—she went down off Birling Gap. Abeona, she were called.’

  ‘And the crew?’ Harriet asked, recalling the terrible night when they had sat huddled together, fearing their shelter was about to be torn apart, all the while unable to take their eyes from the poor boat fighting against the most tremendous winds and high seas that she had ever likely seen.

  ‘They fared well, the cargo not so. One hundred and four hogsheads of claret and one hundred and fifty-five butts of ale lost.’

  Harriet laughed. ‘My old Pa would been chasing those b
arrels a few year ago, then selling them cheap to local public houses.’

  ‘Don’t suppose you be missing those old days, Hattie?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘Heavens, no! To be in one place, settled like this is proper,’ she answered. ‘I wouldn’t want it no other way.’

  There was a slight pause, then Harriet felt Christopher place his hand on her knee and give it a gentle squeeze. ‘And we be here together,’ he whispered.

  Harriet shifted uncomfortably and tensed her leg beneath his fingers. He was a lovely boy, but that was the problem—he was just a boy. She drew her legs to one side so that his hand slid off and nudged the blanket from her shoulders. ‘I best be getting back,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ve just got here,’ Christopher complained.

  ‘I know…’ Harriet began, as she made her way to the yawning mouth of the boat.

  Christopher’s silence made it clear to Harriet that she had offended him and so she emitted a pathetic half-laugh. ‘Blame me, one of these days if I don’t get caught!’

  ‘I only be meaning to say that it’s good—me and you up here, like this—that were all,’ Christopher said awkwardly.

  Harriet’s pleasant, reassuring smile towards him was stolen by the darkness between them. As she carefully considered her reply, a sound from lower down the hill drew her attention. She caught a snippet of someone’s voice on the turn of the wind. Her heart began to thump. Had something happened to Keziah or Ann? Had her parents discovered her clandestine getaways?

  ‘Hattie-’ Christopher began, but Harriet silenced him.

  ‘Someone be calling something,’ she whispered.

  The low groan of relaxing wood told her that Christopher had risen from the bench; she could feel his presence behind her. The pair listened in silence. And there it was again. It was a girl’s voice. Not Keziah’s, though. Nor Ann’s. Then the word appeared again, stitched onto the edge of the breeze.