‘Really?’ Bunny screeched. ‘Oh dear—things must have been truly awful for her to just up and leave her child behind like that. It doesn’t even bear thinking about.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Morton concurred. He allowed the news to sink in, watching Bunny’s perplexed face. ‘It’s my opinion that she probably met Joseph Lovekin around this time and left with him. They married in Church in the Wood in’ – Morton turned the page to the copy of their marriage record—‘July 1803—just a few months after she had disappeared from the workhouse. Joseph and Eliza then had three girls together: Harriet, Keziah and Ann. Then, at some point over the following years, they moved to the America Ground, where they ran a successful gin palace called the Black Horse. Also on the America Ground at this time is Eliza’s old friend, Lydia Bloom—who was living under her married name of Elphick. If you remember back to my last visit, I told you that Harriet Lovekin had married a man called Christopher Elphick—he was Lydia’s son.’
‘Lovely,’ Bunny said.
‘At the library I found out Lydia’s cause of death,’ Morton said, flipping to the next page. Just like Eliza and Joseph Lovekin’s burial entries in St Clements Church, her cause of death had been added.
‘Suicide?’ Bunny read sorrowfully. ‘Those poor girls. We don’t know how fortunate we are, do we?’
‘After losing her friend, Lydia, Eliza then lost her husband, Joseph in what was, so I’ve read, one of the worst storms to ever hit the South Coast.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Now, going back to Lydia’s death—it says suicide and I’ve not found any evidence to the contrary, but I do wonder if there might have been more to it—but I’ll come back to that. Lydia Elphick died soon after trying to sell her house on the America Ground, which prompted an official inquiry.’ Morton moved to the next page, which was a copy of the inquest into the ownership of the land. ‘As we know, Eliza managed to secure a freehold lease to a parcel of land on the America Ground. But, she was the only one.’
‘Really?’ Bunny exclaimed. ‘But how? Why?’
‘Well, the lease was signed by one Alderman Thomas Honeysett,’ Morton divulged.
‘Not the same Thomas…’
‘The very same—if you look at the next page, you’ll see copies of his signatures taken from official workhouse documents and from the lease and release—it’s one and the same person. It’s my theory that Eliza blackmailed him in order to secure the freehold agreement.’
‘And what, she was then murdered and her children were unaware that they were entitled to remain there—that they owned some of the land?’ Bunny asked. ‘You said they moved the pub brick by brick to Shepherd Street.’
‘I think they knew fully well what she’d done,’ Morton answered. ‘And I think they realised that having anything to do with the America Ground was a very dangerous game—a lesson their offspring should have learnt.’
‘Eliza’s murder?’ Bunny asked, her eye widening.
‘Her apparent murder, yes,’ Morton answered enigmatically.
‘What do you mean?’
Morton turned to the next page, which contained an A4 colour copy of the photo of the three graves in Church in the Wood. Bunny examined the photo for several seconds before making any kind of a reaction.
‘I don’t understand. Amelia Odden—that was Eliza’s friend from the workhouse and Harriet and Christopher Elphick. But who’s this in the middle?’ Bunny questioned, moving in closer to read the grave inscription once more. ‘In memory of Eliza Winter 1786 to 1862.’ She looked up at Morton, confusion etched on her face. ‘Eliza Winter? Is that Eliza’s mother?’
Morton shook his head and pointed at the painting. ‘It’s Eliza.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
27th April 1827, The America Ground, outside Hastings, Sussex
It was a beautiful night. The sky was clear and lit by a million glistening stars, each mirrored flawlessly on the surface of the flat inky sea. The crisp moon, displaying a precise dissection, sat high above the America Ground, unassumingly directing the gentle motion of the tides. Despite the breeze rising up from the channel, Harriet was warm, nuzzled at Christopher’s side at the edge of Cuckoo Hill, the pair silently watching a passing ship. To the east, night-time’s cloak concealed the disquiet and sense of foreboding held among the remaining America Ground tenants, and hid from view the growing spaces where houses and business once stood.
They had not spoken for several minutes. Christopher had been unusually quiet and when she had pressed him, he had grown quieter still, denying there to be any problem. Harriet herself was lost in the labyrinth of her own tangled thoughts. It was just over two months since she had sat at this very spot, in the hulk of the Polymina and had been made aware of Christopher’s feelings towards her. Feelings that she had rejected and spurned, in favour of an absurd infatuation with Richard. Inwardly, she was sickened and rebuked herself: how stupid she had been. But now, after such sorrow, they were going to rebuild their lives. Her mother had somehow managed to secure a permanent lease for the Black Horse and their house, which she was now renting to Mrs Woods and Christopher, whilst Harriet, her sisters and their mother resided in the two storage rooms above the gin palace. Although Harriet hated sleeping in the awful room, it did mean that she only had to share a bed with Keziah and Ann; it wasn’t perfect but it would have to do for the moment.
Harriet’s thoughts reverted back to the present when Christopher squeezed her side.
‘Do you be warm enough?’ he whispered.
‘Yes, but I think it be time to get home,’ she answered, slowly and reluctantly standing.
Christopher sighed. ‘We don’t never get more than a few minutes together,’ he lamented. ‘It ain’t fair and it ain’t right.’
‘There ain’t no choice,’ Harriet responded, offering him her hand.
Christopher took it in his and, rather than use it to help himself up, raised it to his lips. ‘I were going to wait for the right moment, but fegs, what be better than this?’ he asked, gesturing out to the midnight landscape. ‘Harriet Lovekin, will you marry me?’
Harriet gasped, giggled then replied, ‘Do you be serious?’
‘Of course,’ Christopher assured her.
She paused a moment and caught a look of seriousness in his eyes. ‘Yes!’
Christopher leapt up and kissed her.
They held each other for several minutes, saying nothing. After all the bad things that had occurred, she could finally see a happy future. She, Christopher, her mother and the girls living on the America Ground, running the gin palace. New homes were sure to spring up all over the place—better homes if the king now owned the land. Harriet smiled, broke from their embrace and reached for his hand.
‘I be knowing the trouble I face, but let’s be a-telling Ma,’ she beamed.
‘Now?’ Christopher asked. ‘It be gone midnight.’
‘I don’t be a-caring!’ Harriet cried. She turned to the sea and shouted, ‘I be getting married!’
‘Hattie!’ he chided playfully. He placed his arms around her waist and kissed her neck.
‘Let’s be going to tell her,’ Harriet persisted.
‘No, I don’t be thinking waking everyone up at such an hour is a good idea, Hattie. Certain-sure, we’d not be permitted to meet again until after we were wed.’
Harriet sagged but knew that he was correct. ‘Alright,’ she murmured, dispirited. ‘Let’s be enjoying our time, then, fiancé.’ She sat back down on the grassy bank and Christopher tucked himself in beside her, sliding his arm around her shoulder.
Harriet was convinced that Christopher must be able to feel the rapid thudding of her heart, drumming as it did throughout her entire body. She tried to set free the words that were trapped inside of her, words that would give a name and shape to the nebulous feelings that were lodged so deep down that they now formed an intrinsic part of her. But the words would not come. Christopher squeezed her arm, as if somehow guiding her to fin
d the courage to speak.
She swallowed hard and gave a space for the words to rise. ‘I love you, Christopher,’ she breathed.
‘I love you, too, Hattie,’ he answered.
Eliza Lovekin was jolted awake by the sound of banging. She sat up in the bed that she had crammed into the smaller of the two storage rooms above the Black Horse. Judging by the weak light that was piercing through the gaps in the window shutters, it was early morning. She swung her legs out of the bed and wandered to the door and listened. More banging. Then she heard what sounded like Christopher Elphick shouting. She opened the door and there she saw Harriet in her white nightdress standing at the top of the stairs.
‘Whatever do that boy be a-wanting?’ Eliza demanded, hastening down the stairs.
‘I don’t be knowing,’ Harriet answered, following quickly behind her.
Eliza turned the key and opened the street door. Christopher was standing in front of them, visibly shaking.
‘It be Mrs Woods!’ he blurted. ‘She be murdered!’
‘What? What happened?’
Christopher shrugged. ‘Butter-my-wig, I don’t be a-knowing! I only be knowing that she be dead—stabbed in the back.’
‘Hattie, you be waiting here. Don’t be letting your sisters out.’ Eliza rushed from the house towards the Black Horse, closely followed by Christopher.
Hurrying through the parlour and up the stairs, Eliza opened her old bedroom door and gasped. Blood—so much blood. It had flowed freely and unstoppably from the slits in Ann Woods’s back, saturating her nightdress, seeping into the straw paillasse. A steady but constant drip from the base of the bed fed a swelling red pool on the floor.
Eliza was sickened and clutched at her stomach, as flashes of the aftermath of Lydia Elphick’s suicide flickered into her mind. Why would someone want to murder poor Ann Woods? Eliza wondered. Then a terrible thought entered her mind and made her shiver. She turned to face Christopher.
‘Christopher, do this be how you found her?’ she asked. ‘With her back to the room?’
‘Yes. I ain’t touched her,’ Christopher answered.
Eliza tried to pull her thoughts from the cyclone in her mind. From the back, in the dark, Ann Woods could very easily have been mistaken for her. But that couldn’t be. Why would anyone want to murder her? Then she knew. The whirling winds of her mind stopped.
‘Shall I be fetching help?’ Christopher said.
Eliza shook her head, still transfixed by the dripping of Ann Wood’s blood. Blood that should have been hers.
‘No,’ Eliza replied, quietly but firmly. ‘We don’t be getting help. Not yet. Go and get Hattie and bring her here, but don’t be saying a word to the other girls.’
Eliza sat quietly, her mind racing as it struggled to process her jittery thoughts.
Moments later, Christopher arrived with Harriet. ‘Close the door, quick,’ Eliza ordered.
Harriet obeyed and shut the street door behind her, joining her mother and Christopher in the almost-dark parlour. Eliza, still wearing her nightdress cut a haunting figure in the gloom.
‘Can we be lighting the candles?’ Harriet asked.
‘No,’ Eliza answered decisively. ‘What be said to Keziah and Ann just now?’
‘Nothing, Ma,’ Harriet said. ‘I be telling them to play, like what Christopher said.’
‘Good. Now you two, be listening good,’ Eliza began. She didn’t know how she was going to explain what she needed to. ‘I be thinking Mrs Woods were killed in my place…’
‘What do you be meaning?’ Harriet begged. ‘I be so boffled, I don’t be knowing what’s happening.’
‘I be meaning that someone wanting me dead took a knife to poor Mrs Woods by mistake,’ Eliza clarified. ‘Not knowing that that I be living above the Horse now.’
‘Who be wanting you dead, Mrs Lovekin?’ Christopher asked.
‘The same person who took your Ma’s life, Christopher.’
Despite the low light, Eliza could see the look of shock on Christopher’s face.
‘But my Ma took her own life,’ he muttered.
‘I don’t be thinking she did take her own life. Be sitting down, both of you, and I be telling you everything.’
The three of them sat at the parlour table and, in a sometimes quivering and unsteady voice, Eliza revealed her past to Christopher and Harriet. Every last pertinent detail of her childhood, that she had hoped would be nailed shut inside her coffin, came out in a dispassionate uninterrupted monologue.
‘Richard be your son?’ Harriet exclaimed, standing up, horrified and sickened at what she had begun to feel for him. Suddenly her feelings became clear: she had had some innate sense of their connection to each other and their shared kinship.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, a confession that she had hoped never to make. It was a secret that only she, Lydia and Amelia knew. Even Joe went to his grave unaware that she had ever given birth to a son. A son whom she could never love because of the blood that flowed in his veins: the blood of Thomas Honeysett. From the moment that she had discovered herself pregnant, she had known that she could never love the child and secretly wished that the vile drugs given to her had worked.
Harriet began to sob and Christopher stood to comfort her. ‘Blame me, I don’t be believing it,’ she cried. ‘It ain’t true!’
Eliza suddenly felt the weight of her past decisions pressing down on her heart, just as surely and painfully as she would have felt the crushing weight of ten men standing on her ribcage. Had she done the right thing in confiding in her daughter like this? Right now, she sincerely believed that the only way for her family to survive was through honesty.
Harriet was about to blurt out I be certain-sure Richard ain’t killed nobody, but then the recollection of the brutality that he showed towards her in his office sprang into her mind.
‘Now what do we be doing?’ Christopher asked.
‘Now you be fetching the coroner and Hattie be fetching Keziah and Ann. You both be saying the same thing: that I be dead.’
The horror and unexpectedness of Eliza’s declaration stunned Harriet and Christopher into silence. Even Harriet’s mortified sobbing ceased as Eliza carefully explained her plan.
Minutes passed before anybody spoke. ‘Ma,’ Harriet said softly. ‘It ain’t the right time, I be knowing, but we got some news of our own.’ She turned shyly towards Christopher, then back to Eliza. ‘We be engaged to be married.’
Eliza smiled and held her eldest daughter. ‘Congratulations,’ she uttered, before hugging Christopher. ‘I think your Ma be proud.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bunny threw both hands dramatically to her chest, the bangles rattling noisily. ‘Not murdered?’ she screeched. ‘But the burial entry—is that a mistake? Or do we have the wrong Eliza?’
Morton shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t a mistake and we do have the right Eliza.’ He turned several pages in the file. ‘Everything ties up to your Eliza Lovekin. Look, this is a report from the Sussex Weekly Advertiser about her murder.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m perfectly lost,’ Bunny declared. ‘She was murdered in 1827 but also went on to live until 1862?’
Morton laughed. ‘Someone was murdered in 1827—a vagrant perhaps, or someone who wouldn’t be missed—and the family covered it up, which was why, when the three girls were sent away to Westwell, Harriet gave her mother’s maiden name as Smith; she knew they wouldn’t find any evidence of their entitlement to be settled but they needed it to look above board.’
‘Surely not?’
Morton nodded. ‘Christopher Elphick was the person who found the body—you’d think he would have recognised his own mother-in-law. Besides which,’ he said, locating another page in the folder, ‘Look who the informant was on Eliza’s 1862 death certificate.’
Bunny squinted at the evidence before her, then looked up at Morton. ‘Harriet Elphick, daughter of the deceased. So they’re not even trying to hide the fact?’
‘Seems a bit bold to me,’ Morton concurred. ‘But, for the remainder of her life, Eliza kept a pretty low profile, living her life out in a nice country cottage with her old friend, Amelia Odden just a few miles away from her children, who continued to run the pub in its new location. Here’s Eliza and Amelia in 1861,’ he said, showing her a highlighted entry for the census of that year.
‘Eliza Winter, seventy-five years of age, of independent means,’ Bunny read. ‘Living with Amelia Odden and a grandson is that? Daniel Elphick?’
‘Yes, that’s right—so, as you can see, the whole family were aware that she wasn’t murdered in 1827.’
Bunny sat back, took a sip of her tea then asked, ‘But it all leads to one question: why?’
‘Thomas Honeysett wanted revenge—it’s no coincidence that he turns up working for the very town corporation that was attempting to gain control over the America Ground where both Eliza and Lydia were living. Those girls had put him in prison serving hard labour-’
‘All his own fault,’ Bunny interrupted.
‘Absolutely, but he was out for revenge and he and his son, Richard, were responsible for compiling a large quantity of the records that was to put the nail in the coffin of the America Ground.’
‘So you think Lydia Bloom, Elphick, whatever her name was, didn’t kill herself, but was killed by Richard and Thomas, then they killed an unknown woman in 1827 believing her to be Eliza?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Bunny looked unconvinced. ‘But what evidence do you have, Morton? Were they found guilty of her murder?’
‘No. I don’t have an arrest or a signed confession, but what I do have is the benefit of history and the unique ability to view and analyse disparate documents together and draw conclusions; that file in front of you, when taken as a whole, is evidence enough.’
She looked suddenly deflated. ‘What about Amelia, then? Was she murdered, too?’
Morton shook his head. ‘No, I received both hers and Eliza’s real death certificates this morning and they both died of natural causes.’
The America Ground (The Forensic Genealogist Series Book 4) Page 28
