by M K Jones
“How big do you think it was, Alice? It must have been very fierce!”
“Oh, at least twenty feet, I’d say.”
Ruth stifled a spurt of laughter at the terrified squeak from Essy. But Alice immediately began to plan how she would get to see a live bear, one day. Then she began to read about the forthcoming excursions across the Bristol Channel by the steamer, the PS Waverley. “Here, Essy, look at the illustration. Isn’t the funnel wonderful, and the huge paddle wheel. We shall stand on the deck in the sunshine, and gaze down the Bristol Channel!”
“Perhaps we shall see as far as Devonshire!”
“Devonshire! I should think so, and more!”
“Where else, Alice?”
“If we go far enough out in the Channel, we might see the coast of France.”
They squealed and laughed and continued to talk about their plans. Ruth heard the swishing sound of her daughter dancing around in the hay.
* * *
Alice sat hunched on the bench, her legs waving backwards and forwards aimlessly above the ground, one arm feeling out for the lambs, but her eyes staying fixed on a spot in the distance. When she couldn’t find the lamb she glanced up, and saw her mother watching her from the parlour. Again, Ruth thought she saw a look of longing. She was desperate to reach out, but held back, willing Alice to come to her. The look was so piercing that Ruth half stood but, remembering John’s wishes, she sat. She waved to Alice and returned to her accounts. When she glanced up again, Alice was gone.
After ten minutes, when there was no sign of the girl, and Ruth realised that her pen hadn’t touched the paper, she sighed, gave up and walked from the parlour to the front door. She stood in the porch, her hand shielding her eyes against the bright sunlight, and looked around the garden.
There was no sign of Alice, but to her left the gate at the side of the house that led to the back of the farm was open. Ruth quickly moved to close it, to stop the lambs escaping, which would have angered John. Alice had only been allowed to keep the lambs because she’d begged her father so desperately and pleaded that she and Essy would take good care of them.
Ruth looked quickly around the yard, but there was no sign of Alice. She gave an exasperated huff and walked back to the front of the house, stopping to tie up some spring boughs close to the front door, before returning to her work. Had she waited a moment, she would have heard the sound of sobbing coming from one of the pigsties. Unknowing, she continued to work with her papers until it was time to supervise the farm workers’ lunchtime meal.
Six
After that night’s supper, Ruth sat in the main parlour on the sofa in front of the fireplace, having seen the younger children to bed. She had listened to Alice read her Bible and then quietly closed the book as John came in and sat in his armchair next to them. He and Ruth had agreed earlier what should be done next. Now it was time to tell Alice.
“Alice, your mother and I have talked over what is best and have decided,” he began firmly, glancing at Ruth for support, “that it is time for you to return to school.” He held his hand up to stop what he expected to be her inevitable protest, but none came. Instead, Alice dropped her gaze and stared at her stockinged feet.
John was puzzled, as Alice had begged, and they had agreed, that she should have a few days following the funeral to herself. He continued, “I know that it will be hard to start your lessons again without Esme but you must take the first step.”
Still no response. He took a deep breath then said more loudly, “Have you heard what I said, Alice?”
“Yes, Dada.”
“So you will return to school tomorrow morning. Is there anything you wish to say to us?”
“No, Dada.”
“Good girl. Now kiss your mama and go to your room. She will come to you to hear your prayers.”
He glanced across at Ruth and saw her look of concern but frowned and turned away impatiently. They had decided. There was no reason for further discussion.
Alice rose, leaned across to her mother and raised her head to kiss the proffered cheek. As she did so, Ruth again thought she caught a flash of misery and appeal, but Alice quickly lowered her head.
They heard her soft footsteps cross the hall, run up the first flight of steps, then on to the landing upstairs, and down the passage to her room. As soon as Ruth was sure Alice was out of earshot, she spoke.
“John, I’m so worried about her. Now before you say anything, I know what you’re thinking!” She held up a hand but softened its harsh gesture with a smile. “You think she’s best left alone to her grieving and return to her schooling, but there’s something more to this, I know there is!”
John was about to protest, but the alarm in Ruth’s voice made him hesitate.
“Well, we had decided, but perhaps you should speak to her, Ruth. I didn’t think it right, but if you are so worried, perhaps we should try to find what’s troubling her, and I must agree that I can see that something is troubling her, more than I would have expected. Two days ago she was begging not to go back to school. Perhaps we have overindulged her!” He ran a hand through his thinning dark hair.
“I think we must,” Ruth suppressed her relief. “I’ll go now.”
At the top of stairs, Ruth could hear Alice beginning her prayers. She stopped for a moment in front of her door, then hesitated again as she caught a few words of what Alice was saying in a voice of strong supplication, “I don’t want to be hurt like Essy…” Ruth’s sharp intake of breath at these words was loud enough to attract Alice’s attention. She glanced around, saw her mother and stood up quickly.
“I’m finished, Mama,” she said quickly, jumping up onto her bed.
“Good child. Would you like to speak with me?”
She wanted to let the girl know that she had overheard and to encourage her to explain her last words. Alice usually liked to talk to her mother about the goings on at the farm and within the farm community. But tonight she replied, “No, thank you, Mama. But I want to ask you a question.”
“Of course,” said Ruth, thinking that if this was about Essy, it was her opportunity to probe.
“Did I have a twin sister, Mama? Did she die?”
The question shocked Ruth into momentary silence.
“No, Alice. You had no twin… sister or brother. What has caused you to ask such a strange question?”
There was silence; the candles on the tallboy flickered, cast shadows around the room. Ruth saw Alice’s hands squeezing and releasing the sheet underneath the bedcover. A breeze from the open window caught Ruth’s hair and blew a loose strand into her eyes. She brushed it away slowly, so as not to disturb Alice’s attention, which remained fixed on her mother, unspeaking, frowning.
“Alice, what has made you think you had a twin sister?”
“Are you quite sure, Mama?”
“Of course. Now, what is the reason for this peculiar question?” she demanded.
“I saw… someone who looked…” She paused, concentrating all effort on finding the right words, never taking her fierce stare from her mother’s face.
“How did she look, Alice?”
“She was me, Mama.”
Ruth breathed in slowly, bemused at the simplicity of a statement she could not comprehend. She breathed deeply and quietly and asked patiently, “What do you mean, Alice, she was you? I don’t understand.”
“She had my face. My eyes, my nose and my… look.” Ruth knew the intense glare that had caused Alice to be told off so many times before for staring, when she was, in fact, concentrating hard. The new schoolteacher had condemned it many times, despite Ruth having explained that Alice was a good student and not the impudent, rude child she had been accused of.
“When did you see this person, Alice?”
“At Essy’s burying, Mama. She was there, the other me.”
“Ah, I see.” Ruth thought that she might know what she was dealing with.
“We have not spoken of Essy, my dear. We – your Da
da and I – thought it best to allow you to grieve for your friend in your own way. Perhaps we should have spoken. This has obviously upset you more that I realised.” She got no further. A look of fear and hopelessness such as Ruth had never seen crossed Alice’s face and she was so shocked by the power of it that she stopped speaking. She felt torn between her husband and child, between duty and love. She knew what she had to do.
“Alice, you will become reconciled. Time will heal.” Again she was stopped in her tracks, this time by the low moan of pain.
“Mama, please, you don’t understand what I saw…”
“Stop this now. Essy is gone. You miss her, but you will recover. That’s enough. We will not speak of it again.”
“No, Mama!” Alice now spoke in shaking sobs, which dropped to a pleading whisper as tears ran down her face. “Please, help me. Don’t let… hurt me… others too… hurt the other… the other Alice. Please, don’t let it!” She grabbed at her mother’s arm. Ruth pulled away.
“Enough, Alice! You are overwrought. Tomorrow you will go back to school and we will say prayers for Essy’s family. That they may bear their loss. Now sleep. We shall speak again tomorrow, when you’re calm.”
She smiled, but the look of defeat in her daughter’s eyes made her falter. But what could a child of ten know about such emotions? She could see Alice shaking under the bed covers, still staring pleadingly. For a moment she hesitated, as she sensed that something odd had touched her. It was pulling at her, unwillingly, like an animal straining on a leash, back towards the bed. She felt agitated and disturbed. As the line pulled her, all of Ruth’s instincts screamed that something was dreadfully wrong. This must have shown on her face, for Alice’s wide eyes responded to the change in Ruth’s expression, with an instant of hope.
“No, Alice,” she said, speaking more to herself than to her daughter, “that’s enough for this evening. Tomorrow…”
She crossed to the tallboy and blew out the candles. Alice didn’t speak. Ruth turned at the doorway. Alice’s stare had not left her mother.
“Goodnight, Alice. God bless you, daughter.” There was no reply.
Ruth sighed and left the room, returning to John in the parlour, deciding to tell him nothing of the conversation, not yet. She was puzzled and troubled at Alice’s hysterical behaviour, but knew that John would have no time for such peculiar moods.
That night she lay awake for hours, thinking over the events of the past ten days and wondering what Alice had been trying to say to her. Perhaps it was more than grief. Perhaps she should have listened, not dismissed her so easily. Such a strange question! Had there really been someone at the graveyard, a real person, not the result of Alice’s imagination? She herself had not seen anyone bearing Alice’s description. Despite the fact that John wouldn’t like it, she resolved to speak to Alice again after school.
The following morning Alice dressed herself, took up her slate, and left for school, accompanied by her brother, William. She said little to either parent before she left and did not turn back at the top of the lane to wave to her mother as usual. Ruth sighed and turned her attention to Thursday baking.
Three hours after Alice should have returned home, and after the farm workers had searched the village and all of the surrounding fields with a frantic John, Ruth knew that she had made a terrible mistake.
Seven
May 2015
For the third day in a row Maggie signed herself in at the entrance desk at Pontypool County Hall and made her way across the plush vault-like lobby through the glass turnstile to the lifts. She descended to the basement that housed the county archives. Stepping out of the lift, she found the striking difference in atmosphere. After the opulence of the entrance, the basement was stark, white, and bare with three long, empty corridors, punctuated by unmarked closed doors. Her footsteps echoed on the concrete floor as she made her way along the farthest corridor towards the windowless archives room. There were few people in the research room, and the ambiance was the usual calm hush.
She smiled at the archivist as she signed in.
“Hello. Me again!”
Noleen, the usually dour archivist, smiled back. “I’ve found something that might help you. It’s the right area, anyway.”
They had got to know each other a little. When she first arrived Maggie had little idea where to start. Despite her habitual unwelcoming demeanour, Noleen had proved to be very helpful, listening to Maggie’s story and suggesting various documents that might help in her search for information on John Jones and his elusive parentage.
Maggie was thrilled when she was handed a pile of church registers from the parishes around the area in which John had been born and where he would have grown up. Each was a leather-bound volume, around two feet high and held together with frayed black ribbon. She was amazed at the excitement she felt in being allowed to handle these historic documents. Before opening them she reverently brushed her fingers over the hard leather covers, imagining the hands that had first touched them, the clerks and scribes of the parish, a cut above the common, and relatively affluent because they could both read and write.
The first volume she opened was of the parish of Llanmartin, covering the births in that area from 1820 to 1890. Each event had been carefully entered in a beautiful copperplate hand, registering the names of the parents and the child, and the date of baptism. In some cases, the names of godparents were also recorded. The paper on which the names were inscribed was a kind of parchment, Maggie guessed, heavy and rough, the colour faded to grey, but still with thick black ink, legible after almost two hundred years.
She went painstakingly through the lists of names, checking each Jones, but not finding John. One of the most surprising discoveries was the number of births recorded as “base” or even “bastard”. Her notion of the nineteenth century had been of an era of great propriety and strict morality. Evidently, this was not the full story, particularly among the lower classes, as many of the people in the register seemed to be agricultural labourers, jobbing tradesmen, or servants.
Noleen handed Maggie another set of registers. “Here’s what I told you about, the Anglican registry, but I don’t know if you’ll find anything if the parents were Baptists. Have you tried Newport library yet?”
“What would they have there that I can’t get here?” she asked as Noleen placed the three foot high stack on the table in front of her.
“You could try another angle, perhaps. They have the local papers on microfiche, and other documents. It’s worth a go, if nothing turns up here.” She hesitated.
“Maggie, it’s possible that your great-grandfather’s birth was never registered, you know. They were all supposed to be, from eighteen thirty-seven onwards, but in the early years some of the country people just didn’t bother. If the child was born at the family home, and if this was their first child, then they might just not have realised the importance of registering. Remember these were uneducated people.”
“But they recorded themselves on the 1841 census,” Maggie countered. “So they must have known that registration was important before he was born. And I still can’t work out from the census if he was John and Eliza’s son or grandson. The 1851 record says ‘son’, but later, when he’s a working man and head of his own household, Eliza seems to be recorded on the 1871 census as ‘grandmother’, which would make him her grandson, not her son.” She put her elbows on the table. “I just can’t figure it out.”
“It would have depended on who was present in the house to give the information to the census recorder. Let me see your records again.”
Maggie showed her the documents she had collected. It was easy to see how Maggie’s confusion had come about. John appeared on the 1851 census as “son”, aged 8, in the household of John and Eliza Jones. Also present in the house was Mary Anne Jones, “granddaughter”, aged 6. But whose daughter would that have made her? The only other adult was sixteen-year-old daughter, Anne. So John’s date of birth would have been aro
und 1846. But as Eliza’s age on the 1851 census was given as fifty-seven, that meant she would have had young John when she was fifty years old. Maggie couldn’t see how this was possible. Old John would have been fifty-five when this child was born. Maggie knew from the 1841 census that they had had a daughter Elizabeth living with them at that time, aged fourteen. And she had found evidence of another son, William, who would have been around seventeen in 1841. At first she thought that he might have been the father of young John, but study of the dates brought home that this, too, could not be possible. Receipt of her John’s marriage certificate showed that he recorded his father as being named John Jones with the profession of farmer (deceased) in 1871 when he married Ruth. But her census research told her that that Old John was an “Agricultural Labourer”, certainly not a “Farmer” and was illiterate. Farmers in the eighteen-forties were usually educated and literate.
So, she searched for a birth in the general register. But the name of John Jones came up with forty-seven responses covering 1844 to 1846. With the General Registry Office charging almost ten pounds a certificate, it was proving to be prohibitively expensive to find out which was her John, and without a mother’s name she already had three possibles and was still checking 1845 births. Very frustrating!
“I see what you mean,” Noleen said when she had gone through Maggie’s records. “It’s just possible that he was born to elderly parents, but I would think it more likely that he was staying with his grandparents when the census was taken, which would mean that his parents either lived elsewhere or were already dead. You could check the death records, but without the mother’s name it’s going to be very hard to track him down. Still, where there’s a will,” she smiled at Maggie and turned back to her desk.
Maggie smiled back, but it was forced. Noleen’s comment had brought back to mind her discussion with her sister Fiona the previous evening.
She had been thinking about whether or not to confide in her sister, but had held back because she was uncertain how Fiona would react. Her best friend, Janice, would have listened to her without judgement, but Maggie held no such expectation of her sister. In the event, Fiona called around unannounced that morning to check how Maggie and the kids were doing. Or at least that was what she maintained. Maggie expected that the cross examination would start as soon as Fiona got her cup of tea in hand and seated herself at the kitchen table.
