October Skies (11 page)

Maurice Lambert, knighted later on, had only one son with his wife Eugenie - née Eugenie Davies, a distant relative through marriage, Julian discovered, to the Duke of Westminster. Their son, Benjamin Edward Lambert, went to Westminster Boarding School and on to Oxford to study medicine, later specialising in the emerging discipline of psychiatry. Julian wondered if that was his father’s aspiration - for his son to practise medicine in the hospital he paid for?

He also managed to find a short article in The Times’ online archive, an article dated 1855 in which it was mentioned that Benjamin Lambert, son of Sir Maurice, had announced that he was preparing to extricate himself from polite London society and travel to the Americas to explore the wilderness of the west. He planned to write a study of the frontier, perhaps even a novel, which he would publish on his return. The paper wished him bon voyage and looked forward to serialising his work.

And that’s where the trail of information dried up.

Julian chewed absent-mindedly on a biro.

That didn’t necessarily mean Lambert perished out in those woods. There might be further biographical footprints from later on in his life, elsewhere. For example, he might have survived and stayed in America - in which case, there would be a trail somewhere.

But for now, there was nothing more he could easily find. Any further information on Lambert would require some digging.

The doorbell rang, and five minutes later Julian was sitting in his bay window looking out past rain streaks at the evening traffic on the road below, enjoying a glass of wine and tearing hungrily into a slice of pizza.

Idly, his mind kept drifting back to Rose and what might have happened last night if there’d been just a couple more empty beer bottles on the table between them.

Get a grip, Julian. You work together . . . it’s best that nothing happened.

Outside a siren bounced off the block of flats opposite as a police car tore down the wet street. The noise broke the spell. And he figured, if it was a spell broken so easily, then perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.

Back to work, slacker.

He wiped grease from his fingers and returned to the keyboard, opening up Google and typing ‘Preston Party’.

He got the usual avalanche of irrelevant hits. ‘Preston’s Bar’ in Chicago was having a party. There were photos of a Preston Macey’s graduation and subsequent party. Preston Town’s civic hall was hosting a question and answer session with their MP from the Labour Party. Preston Entertainment, an online DVD store, had a list of movies with Party in the title. And so on, and so on.

Julian sighed. There was so much tat on the web these days. He tried refining his search: ‘Preston Party’ + ‘Mormons’.

He got several more pages of hits to wade through. The ‘Mormon’ tag was predominantly giving him loads of community and church pages, featuring chatty reportage about recent, wholesome family days out and pending prayer meetings. Lots of pictures of happy, shiny faces; pictures of church elders, respectable and smart - successful by the look of many of them - gathered at picnics and fairs and camps and tents. Pictures of sandy-haired kids in smart casual clothes, innocent and healthy, baring happy grins as they hugged each other and goofed around for the camera.

Julian wondered if any of these kids would one day walk into a high school dressed in black and packing an assault rifle in their shoulder bag ready to do God’s work. Perhaps not. Whilst Julian was not a big fan of religion he conceded that it seemed to hold communities like these together like a sturdy glue. It always seemed to be the loners, the kids who’d floated off into their own lonely parallel universe, who ended up blowing their classmates away.

He leafed through the printed pages of the journal, looking for something. Finding a reference to the preacher’s first name, he tried again: ‘William Preston’ . . . and for good measure he added ‘+Missing Wagon Train’.

The search was too specific. It gave him only one hit. He was about to have another go when something about the brief thumbnail description caught his eye.

. . . account of a Mormon wagon train on their way to Oregon that went missing . . .

He hit the link and was immediately presented with a simple page, a black screen topped with a banner that read ‘Tracing William Preston’s Party’. Beneath that was a rather dry and blandly written block of text laid out in a small and tiresome font that described little more than the early history of the Mormon church. If Julian hadn’t had a particular interest in the subject, this drab-looking web page would have had him clicking away very quickly.

The solid block of text started out by briefly describing how the Church of the Latter Day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith; then the subsequent troubles in Nauvoo; the unpleasant in-fighting of the church; the schisms; how the Mormon church was rounded on by non-Mormon Christians; the outbreaks of violence; and then, finally, describing the Great Mormon Exodus across the Great Plains.

Further down the page, there was a little detail on a minister by the name of William Preston who had formed one of many breakaway Mormon groups and was delivering his flock from the decadent United States into God’s untamed wilderness to set up their own Eden. The short article concluded that Preston’s party set out from a place called Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the spring of 1856 and stopped off at an outpost named Fort Kearny. From there they set out into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.

Julian noticed an email address at the bottom. That was it; there were no other links for further reading, no hyperlinks to other related pages, just this one page of text written by someone who clearly needed to work on his writing style.

There was a comment beside the email address.

I am working on a book about this. If you have information, or wish to share information, please contact me at [email protected].

Julian hovered over the link, tempted to bash out a quick email to see if he could pump the person behind this page for some quick and easy details. Maybe if he suggested he had some - loose - association with the BBC, the author would be flattered enough to open up and share everything with him.

He clicked the link and started to write an introductory email and then stopped.

Hang on. Maybe I should finish up on the Lambert journal first?

Yes. It would make a lot more sense if he knew how the story of the Preston Party was going to go before hooking up with anybody else. He decided this might be someone worth contacting at a later stage, if he needed to fill in some details. But not right now. Whilst this page was most likely authored by some retired old enthusiastic amateur, it might just be another journalist or, God forbid, another programme researcher with the scent of a story in his nostrils.

Instead of emailing the person, he bookmarked the page.

‘We’ll talk in good time,’ he muttered.

He poured himself another glass of red, settled back in his bay window which was rattling with spots of rain, and picked up the pages of Lambert’s journal.

 

William Shepherd looked out of the tall bay windows of his study, over the manicured lawns of the campus, kept a lush green by the regularly spaced sprinklers that stirred to life in synchronicity every evening.

Several classes were sitting in the warm mid-morning sun on the lawn, noisily debating scripture, or silent in prayer, all of them young and earnest people, radiant with purpose and God’s love. Such a contrast to the surly groups of teenagers he noticed on every street corner these days - soulless, mean-spirited creatures with dead eyes, clustered together like cancer cells.

Shepherd shook his head sadly. There was a knock on the door to his study. ‘Mr Shepherd, studio three is ready to record your mid-week sermon.’

‘Thank you, Annie,’ he called out. ‘Tell them I’ll be along presently.’

He heard the squeak of Mrs Wall’s sandals on the wooden floor outside, dutifully hurrying off to inform the studio team.

I have things to think about.

He had almost missed it because it had been buried amongst all the other email he received daily. Shepherd had almost deleted it out of hand as a piece of spam mail. The message was automated, mailed by ‘SiteDog’ software that monitored the accessing of a nominated web page and reported back on details of who and when and how long they had been studying the page. He got these notification emails very rarely, one every couple of months at most. The web page that SiteDog was set up to monitor had deliberately been designed to be as unappealing as possible, tedious for any casual surfer who might by accident stumble upon it. Only someone looking for something very specific would be enticed to stay a while.

He opened the notification mail.

One visitor, several hours ago, had loitered around the page for ten minutes and thirty-seven seconds and then clicked on the contact email link.

‘Who are you, then?’ asked Shepherd curiously.

Someone else interested? Or just a passing surfer?

Someone interested might just mean someone with a little information. If he wanted, he could find out more about this person who had stuck around on this page longer than anyone else had ever done, who had even clicked to send an email, but apparently decided against it. SiteDog presented him with an IP address. With a little - not entirely legal - effort he could get a postal address out of that, if he wanted to.

Be cautious.

Yes, he needed to be that for sure.

I can’t afford to make any silly mistakes now.

Shepherd was beginning to become newsworthy, a candidate that some of the news shows were quietly predicting might be worth ‘watching for the future’. Beyond his core audience of Latter Day Saints worshippers, beyond those that tuned in regularly to the Daily Message, his name was beginning to register; his message was beginning to hit home.

But, unlike the other running candidates, there was no party for him to hide behind, no ranks of fellow Democrats or Republicans to close formation around him like a Roman testudo, to shelter him from the sticks and stones of politics.

There was just his name, his reputation . . . and the message.

I have to be whiter than white. I have to be so careful. I cannot afford a single skeleton in my closet.

 

Ben watched another of the heavy conestogas slide uncontrollably along the churned narrow trail, one wheel clunking and splintering against a jagged rock. It held, but even he could see it was a wheel now fit to break on the next stubborn boulder or sudden rut in the track - either of which could arrive unannounced at any time beneath the thickening carpet of snow on the ground.

The snowfall had started with a light dusting yesterday morning; a feathery weak-willed attempt by the winter to window-dress the peaks a fortnight too early. But it was enough, Ben noticed, to put the fear of God into Keats.

And he’d been driving them hard since - driving them relentlessly towards this pass of his, the one he swore would claw back for them days if not weeks and lead them out onto gentle valleys that sloped mercifully down the rest of the way towards the promised land.

Keats convinced Preston that a last hard dash was required, a run through the night by the light of oil lamps, and now, through an ever-thickening curtain of snow. A dash for the pass because, hampered by snow, the final assent would be impossible for the big wagons and more than likely be too much for the small traps as well.

They had pushed on almost thirty-six hours straight, with only two short stops for cold food. In that time, they had made painfully slow progress uphill, along a winding trail through dense woodland. Trees that had further down the trail held their distance either side of them now brushed against their canvasses, and stung their cheeks with swipes of needles and cones.