by M K Jones
Three Times Removed
M.K.Jones
Table of Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Six
Twenty Seven
Twenty Eight
Twenty Nine
Thirty
Thirty One
Thirty Two
Thirty Three
Thirty Four
Thirty Five
Thirty Six
Thirty Seven
Thirty Eight
Thirty Nine
Forty
Forty One
Forty Two
Forty Three
Forty Four
Forty Five
Forty Six
Forty Seven
Forty Eight
Forty Nine
Fifty
Fifty One
Fifty Two
Fifty Three
Fifty Four
Fifty Five
Fifty Six
Fifty Seven
Fifty Eight
Fifty Nine
Sixty
Sixty One
Sixty Two
Sixty Three
Sixty Four
Sixty Five
Sixty Six
Sixty Seven
Sixty Eight
Sixty Nine
Seventy
Seventy One
Seventy Two
Seventy Three
Seventy Four
Seventy Five
Seventy Six
Seventy Seven
Seventy Eight
Epilogue
Publication Details
Prologue
12 May 1883
Alice feels the needles of rain stab her eyes. But she doesn’t blink. She is fixed on the casket as it judders and jerks into the pit.
Above her head is a dense, grey fog sucking itself towards the earth. Water has already run down her neck into the back of her new coat. Underfoot is a freezing swamp, the water soaking up into her boots, turning her feet to ice. She is shaking, and has been unable to stop shaking for four days now. But still she does not blink.
The coffin disappears from view. Each black-clad bowler-hatted man, heels dug in, carefully manoeuvres his rope from hand to hand. The ropes, glistening in the rain, give out sodden squeaks that sound like tiny screams. She hears it hit the bottom with a squelch and a sigh.
Essy is gone now. Her best friend. Her only friend. Dead in her place. Guilt and terror well up inside. But Alice dare not let them out.
Her hand, gripped by her mother’s, is shaking badly. Her mother squeezes a warning and Alice remembers her words of the previous evening. The attendance of a child will be shameful. We will allow it, although we know we will be considered disgraceful and disreputable in certain quarters. You will not bear your grief in public.
Alice understands. She glances around. Dada stands next to Mama. Then Essy’s mother, barely able to stand, supported by her husband. Then the holy scandal lovers, expressions arched, lips pursed.
And finally, staring straight back at her, It. Has no-one else noticed that It doesn’t get wetted by the rain? Just like when It held Essy’s head under water? Then It put its head right in to check that she was dead and came back up dry? As Alice had watched, horrified, from behind the trees, It scooped out a lump of grey and red from the hole It had made in Essy’s skull, tilted its head back, and poured the mass into its mouth. Alice shudders at the gory memory.
The service is over. It is still staring at her. Alice has looked away but she knows. She feels the ice. “I am coming for you. Soon.” She feels the words. It moves forwards to her parents. Speaks words of condolence. Mama smiles and nods. But not warmly. She doesn’t like It. Nor does Dada.
Rumours are spreading about Alice. The other children watch her all the time. She can hear their questions.
“Did Alice Jones really arrive too late? How did Essy get that big hole in the back of her head if she fell into The Pond face first?”
The policeman believed her story. Didn’t he?
The rain eases, but not the cold.
Alice feels a soft tingle on the back of her coat, between her shoulder blades, as if someone is gently scratching her with a very small fingernail. She turns her head to look behind her, across the path. Who is it, staring at her, waving gently? She waves gently back. A girl shimmers into view, slowly moving closer. Alice gasps in surprise. It’s herself. Her own face staring back at her. Is she becoming mad? Will they put her in the asylum? The mirror image smiles and waves her fingers again. Away in the background she can make out a shadow Mama, who seems to be hacking at a gravestone back across the path. Alice tentatively waves back. But a cold agitation turns her around again. It can see this mirror of Alice too. Her fingers turn from a wave to a warning, quickly flashing backwards and forwards. The girl sees. She can see It, too. She nods and moves away. Disappears into the mist.
Mama moves away to speak to the minister. Freed from her grip, Alice walks forwards to stand on the edge of the open grave. She stares down at Essy, clasping her hands as if to pray. But instead she whispers softly, distressed. “I miss you, Essy. I’m so scared all of the time now. I want to tell Mama and Dada who did this to you but they won’t believe me. Did you send that strange girl? Am I gone mad? I don’t know what to do. What shall I do, Essy?”
Mama returns and pulls her back by the arm. She wants to get away from the holy scandalmongers. Hidden in the mist, the other girl can still see. She watches them for a moment, then turns back to shadow Mama.
One
12 May 2015
Maggie Gilbert loved a good cemetery. Now she felt a rush of excitement as she turned off the road and through the black wrought iron gates. She was thrilled to find out that there might actually be a cemetery to search, after weeks of mounting frustration.
The information had come in a chance encounter at the Council Tax office, chatting to the clerk.
“Family history? Me too, I love it! I’ve managed to find ten generations. Mind you, some of them turned out to be a bit unsavoury. Where did yours live?”
“I don’t really know,” Maggie replied. “I’ve tracked back to 1841 on the internet census records, but I can’t find out any real detail on where they lived or what they did. How did you find out about the unsavoury bits?”
“Oh, mainly through their professions and where they lived. And where they died. A couple of mine died in the workhouse. Have you checked the municipal cemetery?”
“There’s a cemetery?”
The hedges that separated it from the main road into the town centre had grown high, so drivers speeding by on the highway would never know it was there.
The clerk had told her that when it was opened as a new municipal facility in 1883 it had been a well-known landmark, but had filled up its allotted space by the 1960s.
The tarmacked car parking area had six spaces, all empty. The car park was bordered by the the warden’s abandoned cottage, a whitewashed chapel, and a low stone wall. Beyond the chapel lay an acre of headstones sloping down towards a drab 1960s council estate. Maggie shivered as she got out of the car and pulled her scarf up around her neck
to her short brown hair.
It was very cold for May, at the end of what had been a disappointingly late spring. There weren’t many blossoms, or early summer flowers. It was mid-morning, but the lingering remains of mist from the previous night’s frost floated low across the graves. The sky was a silver grey through which a pale sun fleetingly appeared. Even for a graveyard it was very quiet. Maggie shivered again and headed for the chapel to search for clues.
“Maggie Gilbert, family history detective!” she thought wryly as she prepared to hunt down the past. “Woman on a mission – unemployed woman who ought to be out looking for a job.”
She could see that the chapel was boarded up and the smaller windows high up were broken by stone-shaped holes. She peered hopefully through a gap in the boarding but the chapel had been stripped bare, not even the altar remained. On the front porch at the top of the arch 1883 was carved into the stone in a flowery script.
“Dead end,” she thought, liking her pun.
She could see that many of the graves were sinking and overgrown. More than half of the ornate headstones in this top area leaned precariously, as if they might keel over at any moment. Some were laid flat. A footpath dissected the rows of graves, connecting the housing estate with the main road and the budget supermarket across the road from the entrance. Apart from a lone pedestrian pushing a shopping trolley it was deserted.
The grass was overgrown, weeds roamed freely across the ground and the atmosphere spoke to Maggie of forgetfulness and neglect.
She followed the path around the outside of the chapel and began to look at the headstones to get her bearings. She saw that the first burials had been closest to the chapel and dated from 1883. They stood in the shade of a tree close to the back of the chapel and were all children. That made her plan simple. She’d start close and work her way along the rows out towards the far wall. Her main problem was going to be discipline – to make herself concentrate on who she was looking for and not get distracted. Maggie knew that she might be looking for more than one grave, but hoped that she would find everyone she was searching for in one plot.
She couldn’t remember when this love of graveyards had started. Whenever her parents had taken her and her sister to visit an old church, she had made a beeline for the cemetery and had spent her time studying the graves. She liked to play a game of “find the person longest dead” and conjure up a picture of them.
Setting off slowly across the uneven ground, she reflected grimly on how her originally tepid interest in her family history had deepened strangely and quickly into obsession, taking up time that should have been spent on more practical things, like finding work to shore up her rapidly dwindling bank balance.
It had begun shortly after moving into her new house, on a rainy afternoon idling away time waiting for the children to come home from school. Dozing in her favourite armchair in front of her beautiful view, a random idea came into her head, like a dream that couldn’t quite be recalled. With images of her father, who had been dead for over twenty years and the people who were his family. But she had barely met any of them and wouldn’t recognise them if they passed on the street, so how did she know that was who they were? Quite suddenly, yet inexplicably, she needed to know.
In the weeks that followed she searched library archives and genealogy files. At first it had been easy, working back through her parents’ birth certificates, then census records. She had easily got back to her great-grandfather, John Jones, in 1851, when he had been eight years old and living with his grandparents and younger sister, Mary Anne. But despite many hours of research and investigation she was stuck and couldn’t discover what had happened to his parents.
She had first come across her great-grandmother, Ruth Jones, in 1871. They had married in September that year when he was twenty-eight and she eighteen, but it had taken some time to find them on the April 1871 census. She found John first, working on the municipal railway and living with some family members who she thought were probably his grandmother and a maiden aunt – who herself had a ten-year-old son with, according to his birth certificate, no recorded father.
“He’d have taken some explaining away at chapel,” Maggie had thought wryly. She vaguely remembered her father’s family from occasional gatherings, as a serious, unsmiling, strongly religious horde.
It was some time before she found Ruth in the time before her marriage, but eventually she did at seventeen years old – working on a farm as a servant with her parents, William and Ruth, a blacksmith and serving woman. Maggie imagined that they had met at chapel, for where else would a railway worker meet a farm servant? When that census was taken that year they were probably courting. They had been married at the Ebeneezer Baptist Chapel and William, the first of their five children, was born in 1875. She had been able to trace her family from there to the present day, but she couldn’t get any further back.
Her sister had no interest in family at all. “Who cares, Mag?” Fiona’s response to Maggie’s story about her research had been a shrug. “Dad never did. They don’t even acknowledge us, so why waste your time?”
“Why indeed?” Maggie asked herself. Why had she become so interested in finding out about her father’s family? Why was she particularly drawn to the image of her great-grandmother, Ruth? She couldn’t explain it.
But as soon as she began searching they had become real to her, as she found out their names, and where they had lived, and what they had done, Maggie found that she had become obsessed with – what? She didn’t know, but it was like an itch. There was something about it that bothered as well as enthralled her, and she had to find its source. She kept digging because she had to know.
Maybe it was her keen detective skills and perseverance that had emerged that kept her searching through websites and archive files long past the time she should have been somewhere else. And there was the fantastic feeling of excitement when the detecting and the perseverance paid off and she found a piece of information that added more to the picture she was building from the fragments of the past.
Her children, family and friends had been amused, then amazed, at how she kept at it. They had looked at her strangely, without understanding, when she explained that something in the past, born out of a memory in a dream, was crying out to be understood. When she tired of the sarcastic remarks she said it was just a hobby. But it was much more than that. As time went on, Maggie felt that she was being directed. And that scared as well as excited her. She had told no-one that she was going to search a cemetery today for people she felt she knew who had been dead more than a hundred years. Well, almost no-one.
She continued to walk up and down the rows of graves, picking her way gingerly over the wet grass and taking care to avoid stepping on the dead. But she become more and more distracted by the names, dates and details she found. She was unable to stop herself from reading the information carved into stone. Most of the graves had traditional Welsh names: Jones, Williams, Morgan, Evans. The detail fascinated her. So many loving wives and beloved husbands, so many stories. She read about the children, too, close to the chapel. Elijah Williams aged four and his brother David. Died on the same day in 1885, grief stricken parents. Esme Ellis, aged twelve, died tragically May 4, 1883, greatly missed by her loving family. Poor little thing. What tragedy? William Lewis, eighteen months, taken suddenly. By what, or whom?
After a dozen rows she checked her watch. “Damn! Lunch time. Come on, concentrate. Just look for the names,” she chided herself.
She began to hurry, giving each gravestone a quick once over. This was just a first visit anyway. It would be a miracle if she found what she was searching for first time. A couple more rows then she’d have to leave it.
Rushing along a final row she stumbled a few times over the uneven ground and, as she stepped over a fallen headstone, she caught her foot and tripped on some creepers that had run across the ground from a particularly ornate grave. Now on her hands and knees she glanced at the stone in front of her
and – this was it! A beautiful but overgrown pale stone, tall and pointed with elegant, smooth, rounded dark green marble columns at each side. The wording, elaborately carved, was reasonably clear, although overgrown by moss and ivy. “John Jones, beloved husband of Ruth. Died 4 May 1909 at… damn!” She tried to remove the ivy covering the next line but it clung tenaciously. At the bottom she could just make out, “…and Ruth, devoted wife. Died 21 November 1936. Together with God.”
Maggie leapt up, elated at having succeeded, yet desperate to clean the stone further to find the full details. Then she realised that she was going to be late. “I’ll be back,” she said to the headstone, then felt foolish that she had spoken out loud. She ran back on the path and around the chapel to her car.
Two
12 May 1909
The day began fine, unseasonably warm for early May. By midday it was too hot. Inside the packed chapel the mourners sweated their way through the service. But any man who tried to surreptitiously ease his high, starched collar was frowned on by stiff, silk-clad women. They would not be permitted to show themselves up by any such lack of respect. Fidgeting children were stilled with a sharp poke.
In the hush at the end of the hymn, Minister Robinson rose. He nodded compassionately at the family in front of him. He had liked and respected John Jones, the man now in the coffin.
Two years earlier at sixty-one and physically drained, John had retired from his farm and left his eldest son, William, to carry on the family business. Although not a man of great physical stature, his firmness in his beliefs, together with a fine mind and upstanding values, had given him the aura of a powerful, righteous man, which had made him a respected local figure. But from the sudden onset of sickness, he had spiralled down to a sucked-out shell and his slow, excruciatingly painful death had been a terrible thing to witness, as Minister Robinson had done, day in, day out, for the final four months. Every day, Richard Robinson had walked the half mile from the chapel along the canal bank to the splendid retirement house that John had built for Ruth and his family.
A beam of sunlight entered the high window behind him and illuminated the coffin. The memory of John’s last words fleeted through the minister’s mind as he looked down at Ruth. “Help them to live here without me. They never thought… they would have to,” rasped out of a throat with few words left in it. “Keep them safe, Richard. Help…” a pause, another huge effort, and a weak smile “…help Ruth… to accept.” He knew that John wasn’t talking about his own death. Like many times before, he thought bitterly to himself, “If only I had been here then. There must have been something I could have done. Perhaps it could have been different.” But he knew this was no more than his own vanity.
