Asta's Book (48 page)

Cary wanted to know what was in the rest of the papers but Lisa said there was nothing significant, they were just letters between her great-grandparents and irrelevant documents. Still, it would be wrong not to look, Cary said, and began going through them. Lisa got up, rubbed her back as if sitting in an armchair was unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and dropped cross-legged on to the floor.

The ‘irrelevant documents’ included Mary Schaffer’s birth certificate but not, of course, George Ironsmith’s.

‘If I’d had that I’d have known where he came from,’ Lisa said in her rather surly way.

The Ironsmiths’ marriage certificate, issued at Chicago in February 1904, gave Mary Schaffer’s age as thirty-eight and her status as a widow. George Ironsmith was himself thirty-four, his profession described as ‘commercial traveller’. The letters that had passed between them, mostly during their engagement, were as dull and uninformative as those which poor Mogens had written home from France and my cousins had tried in vain to publish. Lisa had been right and they told us nothing beyond the fact that Mary Schaffer had been married to her first husband for fifteen years and the marriage had been childless.

The bombshell wasn’t in the letters at all but in a copy of George Ironsmith’s indentures. These showed that for seven years from 1885 he had been apprenticed to a butcher and slaughterman in Carlisle.

‘My dad found that,’ Lisa said from her Buddha-like pose on the floor. ‘I’d never seen it before.’

We all looked at the document, yellowed and faded with age. She watched us, pleased with the effect it had.

‘You know what the judge said. “She was murdered in a most remarkable way.” He said she was murdered by someone who knew well how to put a person quickly to death. He would, wouldn’t he? He’d been putting all those poor cows and sheep to death for years and years.’ Lisa squeezed her eyelids together. ‘Personally, I’m a vegetarian.’

‘But why would he do it?’ said poor Cary.

‘I told you, to please his wife. To get rid of Lizzie for ever.’

‘He’d put his own life in jeopardy for that? Murder a woman his wife had never seen and scarcely heard of? Murderers got hanged then, you know. They weren’t sent to do community service for a couple of years.’

‘For love,’ Lisa said coldly. ‘It was a great passion with my great-grandmother. People do these things for love. I know what ship he went back to the States on, if that helps you.’ She gave Cary an unpleasant smile when she spoke those last four words. ‘It was the
Lusitania
from Plymouth, England, to New York, and it called in somewhere, Boston, I think.’

Miles said perhaps passenger lists still existed.

‘You mean you don’t believe me,’ said Lisa. ‘You do really though, don’t you? You’d never have made that movie if you’d known what you know now. So what are you going to do about it?’

Not lose touch, Cary promised.

‘Oh, I’ll call you,’ said Lisa. ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’

After she had gone Cary went into hysterics. That’s easily said but Cary really did. She howled, she laughed, she banged her fists against the wall, she ran her fingers through her hair, stared wild-eyed at Miles and said she was going to start smoking again. This was it. She needed a very large drink and twenty cigarettes.

We went down to the pub.

‘What shall I do?’

‘A bit of checking before you commit yourself,’ I said. ‘That boat for a start.’

The two of us are inveterate researchers. We both knew where to find things and how to go about it. Not even for a couple of days, let alone years, would we have remained in ignorance of our great-grandparents’ provenance, we would have found out.

Of course, when doing research, in most cases one wants to find out. The truth may not fit a theory but then the theory must be sacrificed and one possibility after another eliminated. Cary, this time, didn’t just not want to know; she was emphatically, almost neurotically, against knowing. She would have liked to be able to forget it and simply get on with her next project. Not only did she not dare do this for fear of Lisa’s disclosures spoiling the effect of her production, but the way she had been trained made it not a feasible solution. She would get no pleasure out of the transmission of
Roper
, no possible satisfaction out of presenting to the public an erroneous account. She had to know but she was wretched as she went about it.

The first thing she discovered was that Lisa Waring—or, more probably, Spencer Waring—had been wrong about the ship in which George Ironsmith returned to the United States and his wife Mary on July 29th, 1905. Very likely the name
Lusitania
came into his mind because this was the British liner almost as famous in the history of sea tragedies as the
Titanic.
It was the sinking of the
Lusitania
by a German submarine in 1915 which contributed to the entry of the United States into the First World War.

What had plied between Great Britain and the United States, across the Atlantic, in the early years of the century?

Cary got hold of a Cunard passengers’ log book. A formidable number of vessels went back and forth, the
Hibernia
, the
Arabia
, the
Servia
, the
Umbria
and
Etruria
among others. The
Cephalonia, Pavonia, Catalonia, Bothnia
and
Scythia
provided the weekly Boston service, from Liverpool on Thursdays and back from Boston on Saturdays, calling at Queenstown. It obviously wasn’t on one of these liners that Ironsmith had travelled.

Nor, if the postcard was to be relied on, had he used the fortnightly Tuesday service, plied by the
Aurania, Servia
and
Gallia.
None of these ships left from Plymouth but all from Liverpool, disembarking their passengers at the company’s centrally situated wharves, 51 and 52 (North River), New York City, and at the New Pier, foot of Clyde Street, East Boston.

Cary decided to forget Plymouth. This was obviously a mistake on Spencer Waring’s part. In her view the New York Saturday Mail Service from Liverpool was the most likely option and that Ironsmith had travelled on the
Campania
, the
Lucania
, the
Etruria
or the
Umbria.
Second class, she hazarded, on a return ticket which would have cost him between $75 and $110. She applied to the Cunard Steamship Company and found to her astonishment that passenger lists existed. These, however, were kept in the country of destination, in this case in the National Archives in Washington, DC. It took her a little while but she found what she wanted—or what she needed—to know.

George Ironsmith had travelled to Liverpool from New York on Saturday, July 15th, 1905, and returned from Liverpool to New York on July 29th.

He had made the journey from the United States alone but he had not gone back unaccompanied.

28

IT WAS ALL
so long ago.

The
Lucania’s
passenger list showed only that among the second-class passengers on Saturday, July 29th, 1905, had been George Ironsmith and Mary Ironsmith, the latter travelling at half-fare and so therefore a child between the ages of two and twelve.

If Ironsmith had a child there was no evidence for it. He had been a bachelor when he married in February 1904. The Waring family had never heard a whisper or rumour of some child born to him and his wife before they were married. Letters which had passed between him and Mary Schaffer made it clear she had no children of her first marriage.

Questioned by Cary, Lisa said she had no idea who this child was, had never before heard mention of a child in this connection. Plainly this digression made her impatient. All she wanted was for Cary to recognize her great-grandfather as the murderer of Lizzie. Probably this child was just someone Ironsmith had been asked to take to America in his charge, had Cary thought of that?

That would hardly explain that child being called Mary Ironsmith, Cary said. Besides, what parents or guardians would place their little girl in the care of an unknown young man on a six-day sea voyage?

It was Cary herself who at last expressed what we had both been thinking and had both half-dismissed as impossible. She had been re-reading the first volume of the diaries in the hope of finding a positive Roper clue. What she did find wasn’t a statement of contemporary fact at all but only one of Asta’s famous stories.

She rang me up to tell me. The date was years after the Roper affair, December 18th, 1913.

My cousin Sigrid told me that in the street next to them in Stockholm there lived a man who was condemned to death for murdering a woman. It was a strange story. He was married but he and his wife had no children and they desperately wanted a child. It must have been the wife’s fault because he had a child by his mistress who lived up in Sollentuna. The mistress refused to give up the child, she wanted him to divorce his wife and marry her, but he loved the wife, so he murdered the mistress and took the child for himself and his wife to adopt.

It was just a story, I said. Hadn’t Asta been writing about guillotines, of all things?

‘I know it’s a story. I’m not saying Asta is doing anything more than referring to something she was told by someone else possibly ten or more years before. But it’s a scenario, isn’t it? It’s something that happened. It happened in Sweden in 1900 or whatever and it could have happened in England in 1905.’

I said the child called Mary Ironsmith who accompanied George Ironsmith on the
Lucania
couldn’t have been Edith Roper. She was too old. Unless she was over two he wouldn’t have had to pay a fare for her.

‘Edith was too old to be Swanny Kjær,’ Cary said, ‘and now you’re saying she was too young to have been Mary Ironsmith. But look at it this way. He would have wanted to avoid too many questions being asked, wouldn’t he? Edith was a big child and she was walking. She probably looked two years old. Ironsmith had no way of knowing when Lizzie’s body would be found. He didn’t know Maria Hyde wasn’t alive and asking questions. It was a piece of luck for him they weren’t found for a week. By then he’d arrived in New York and no doubt was on his way in the train to Chicago.’

‘You’re saying that if he hadn’t bought her a ticket he might have been questioned about her age and he wouldn’t have been able to prove she was under two?’

‘More than that. He wouldn’t have wanted to be even suspected of travelling with a girl child of fourteen months. According to the passengers’ log book, Marconi’s Wireless Telegraphy was installed on all Cunard passenger boats. I’ll read you what it says: “The world’s news and weather reports are circulated by this means between isolated lines crossing the Atlantic, and passengers’ messages are accurately transmitted to the shore, even while many hundreds of miles from land.” ’

Hadn’t I read, I said, that Crippen in 1910 had been the first murderer apprehended at sea by the means of wireless?

‘Ironsmith didn’t want to precede him by five years, did he?’ said Cary.

The unwritten script we made, verbally, among ourselves, Cary and Miles, Paul and I, had Ironsmith asking Lizzie to give their daughter up to him as soon as he married. He had married a woman whom he knew could never have children and who wanted a child. Cary suggested he made a trip to this country specifically for the purpose of gaining possession of Edith, that he asked for her, offered to buy her, and when his efforts failed began making threats. Had it been in dread of Roper’s finding out from her former lover himself, that Lizzie confessed to her husband Edith wasn’t his? Did she preempt an uglier revelation?

Miles believed Lizzie half-yielded. After all, it looked as if she would lose her husband if she persisted in his bringing up her child. As it was, he had gone to Cambridge without her and taken her son with him. He had already told her (Miles thought) that when she joined him in Cambridge after a week or so she was to come alone. The child could be left with Maria Hyde. Miles said he had never understood that arrangement whereby Roper and his son went to Cambridge and Lizzie was left behind. It would have been another matter if it had been a permanent separation but it wasn’t. Roper had evidently expected her the following Saturday. However, all was explained if Lizzie was left behind to spend the next few days finding a home for Edith or persuading her mother to keep her.

But Lizzie loved the child, Cary objected. Lizzie wouldn’t have considered giving her up. Ah, but she might have done at the prospect of being a deserted wife and without means of support. No alimony in those days, no maintenance, for a woman who was a ‘guilty party’. Better to join Roper in Cambridge and maintain an outward respectability, especially if she knew Edith was being well cared for, was wanted and loved and getting a better chance in life than she could give her.

‘That’s all very well but she didn’t give her up to Ironsmith,’ Paul said.

‘Suppose she promised to do so and reneged at the last minute?’

We considered this suggestion of Cary’s. No one had any information about the week preceding the murder. Ironsmith may have been at Devon Villa every day for all we knew, arguing with Lizzie, cajoling, persuading, threatening. At some point she gave in. It could have been the Tuesday or the Wednesday before Roper left. An arrangement was made for Ironsmith to come for Edith on the evening of Thursday, July 27th after Roper had gone.

When he got to Devon Villa, letting himself in with the key he had kept since he was a lodger in the house, Lizzie told him she had changed her mind. She was keeping Edith and staying in Hackney with her mother. They would survive as they had in the past before Roper came on the scene. No doubt he tried to make her see reason but she was adamant. She hated Roper, she had no feeling for her son. Her little girl was all she had to live for.

Ironsmith had a passage booked on the SS
Lucania
for Saturday, July 29th, two days off. He had told his wife he would be bringing the child. I kept thinking of Asta’s story and the man who had wanted his mistress’s child for his wife, had murdered her and just escaped being guillotined. Perhaps such stories proliferated, apocryphal tales founded on a single real instance, and then sometimes they came true. Ironsmith might even have heard such a story himself and made it true.