The Lost Ancestor (2 page)

Morton was hurriedly writing everything
down.  ‘Was there anything else with it, a note maybe?’

‘Yes, a small card which read ‘I hope you
are at peace’.’

Morton nodded, not wishing to express his
curiosity over the turn of phrase used. 
I hope you are at peace.
 
It could be interpreted in several different ways.

‘She came back,’ Ray said quietly, before
turning to his desk and pulling open a drawer.  He held up two silver
lockets and handed them to Morton.  ‘And here they are.’

Morton took the pendants from Ray. 
Just as he said, they were identical, made of sterling silver with a precious
stone set in the centre.  Morton unclasped the first and saw a tiny
photograph of Ray’s grandmother, Edith.  Inside the other locket was a
photograph which was unmistakably Mary Mercer.  ‘May I take a photograph
of them, please?’

‘By all means, go ahead.’

Morton set the lockets down side by side
and took a digital photo of them.

‘I had the handwriting on the card
analysed and compared with what I knew was her writing in an old book of hers I
found.  The graphologist I employed was pretty certain it was the same
person: it was Mary Mercer, alive and well in Winchelsea in 1962.  His
report and copies of the two pieces of handwriting are in the pile for you.’

Morton looked down at his scribbled
notes.  The Mercer Case just got more interesting.  ‘I’ll find her,’
Morton said, almost to himself, as he took a cursory glance through the rest of
the paperwork.  Ray had even included a typed list of all the negative
searches he had made; he had certainly been meticulous in his research.

‘Will you?’ Ray said.  He shook his
head and exhaled.  An almost imperceptible moistening of the old man’s
eyes told Morton that finding his great aunt had become more than a hobby to
him, more than a curious incident on a family tree; it had grown into something
personal.  ‘My dear granny meant so much to me, being more of a mother
than my own in the end and the thought of how upset she would get talking about
Mary will haunt me until the day she’s found.  I know it sounds daft, but
I just want to visit Granny’s grave and finally tell her what happened to her
twin sister.’

‘I totally understand; I’d feel the same
way,’ Morton told him with a reassuring smile.  ‘Now, all these documents
are great—thank you—but what I really need from you is anything that you know
about Mary which doesn’t come from certificates, censuses and photos. 
What did your granny tell you about Mary?’  Anything at all: places she
visited on holiday, relatives abroad, previous absconding, boyfriends, jobs…?’
Morton probed, knowing that the tiniest snippet of information could lead to a
breakthrough.

Ray paused and stared out of the window. 
After several seconds had passed, he turned back towards Morton.  ‘There’s
really very little that I can think of.  I know she worked at a large
country mansion in Winchelsea as a housemaid, but that she wasn’t very good at
the job.  Like all siblings, they fell out and made up.  I don’t know
of any relatives abroad or other people she was close to.  I doubt very
much the family ever went on holiday—it just wasn’t done in those days. 
Granny would just repeat the same stories over and over until the day she
died.  She felt that she’d let Mary down.  Even in the delirious
throes of death, she was apologising to Mary for having let her go.’

Morton looked up from his notepad, curious
by Ray’s turn of phrase.  ‘Were those her exact words?’

‘Well, along those lines.  Obviously
I don’t remember precisely.’

Morton nodded.  ‘What about Mary’s
belongings?  Do you know what happened to them after she disappeared?’

Ray shook his head sadly.  ‘Sorry,
I’m really not much help, am I?  By the time I came along in 1935 she’d
been gone for twenty-four years.  Her parents were dead, so I assume
everything was disposed of.  I didn’t find anything of Mary’s other than a
few books among Granny’s effects after she died.  Sorry.’

‘It’s fine.  Could I see the books,
please?’ Morton asked.

‘They’re all together here—there’s only
four of them,’ Ray said, reaching for a small stack of books in a nearby
shelf.  He handed them to Morton.  ‘You can borrow them if you
like.  I’ve read them all cover-to-cover, just in case there was any kind
of a secret message or hidden note.  Alas not.’

‘Thank you,’ Morton replied, taking a
quick look at the cover of the top book, entitled
Four Sisters.
 
‘What about other family members?  Did Mary and Edith have any other
siblings?’

‘There was an older sister,
Caroline.  She married a soldier, called William Ransom; they lived in
Bristol and had one child, a daughter called Rebecca.’  Ray walked
sombrely back over to the window, something Morton could see he did with
regularity.  ‘Their side of the family have never been any help,
though.  Granny didn’t really keep in touch with them—I get the feeling
there was a falling out or something a long way back.  Not much hope of
finding what happened to her, is there?’ he muttered.

‘Well, I’m willing to take the case on and
give it a go,’ Morton said.

Ray turned, standing in a puddle of white
sunlight.  He smiled.  ‘Don’t take too long about it.  Not to
put too fine a point on it but I’ve got stage four cancer of the pancreas.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ Morton said,
realising just how much finding his lost aunt meant to Ray and how little time
he had in which to find her:  ‘I’ll do what I can for you.’

‘Thank you.  Is there anything else
you need from me?’

‘This is all a good start,’ Morton said,
holding up the stack of papers.  ‘I’ll get back to you if I need anything
else.’  Morton reinserted the paperwork back into the manila folder, then
packed away his briefcase.  He stood, ventured towards the window and shook
Ray’s hand.

‘Thank you, Morton,’ Ray said
quietly.  ‘I finally feel there’s a glimmer of hope at finding her.’ 
He briefly turned to the photograph of Mary and Edith.  A snapshot of
history when their family was intact.

Morton said goodbye and left the
house.  As he walked down the driveway towards his Mini, he began to lay
the pieces of the puzzle out in his mind.  Unlike the bog-standard
genealogical cases that he used to undertake, whereby he would research the
ancestral lines of a particular surname, this type of case intrigued and
excited him.  The fragmented Mercer Case
jigsaw in his mind needed
to be reassembled.  Quickly.  He didn’t know much about pancreatic
cancer but he did know that stage four meant that Ray probably didn’t have long
to live.

As Morton drove the forty-three miles back
home, he began to consider his first steps in the case.  The bottom line
for him was that someone, somewhere had once known what had happened to Mary
Mercer.  His job was to find that person.

Monday
2
^nd
January 1911

Edith
Mercer stared into the tiny hallway mirror, her self-directed anger increasing
in earnest as she tugged her hairbrush through her thick dark hair.  ‘For
God’s sake!’ she muttered, regretting cursing the moment the words had passed
her lips.

‘Edie!’ a hollow voice berated from the
living room.

Edith exhaled sharply.  ‘Sorry,
Father.  It’s my hair, it’s awful.  And my face.  They’re not
going to want to give me
any
job at Blackfriars House, never mind a job
as third housemaid.’  Edith lifted the unwieldy hair and let it fall
untidily around her ears.  At seventeen years of age, Edith hated her
appearance; she always had.  She had hoped that when the change into
womanhood had arrived, just like her older sister, Caroline, had once intimated,
she would somehow be transformed from the plain-looking girl she saw before her
into someone much more beautiful.  In fact, the change had only left her
with greasy, blotchy skin and equally oily unmanageable hair.  Her
childish naïvety had led to dreams of metamorphosing into Ellaline Terriss, a
stage star with whom Edith had become enchanted after seeing her performing in
the musical comedy
The Beauty of Bath
at the Aldwych Theatre.  It
was Ellaline’s centre-parted hair which fell into neat ringlets that Edith was
attempting to replicate.  She rubbed her face with a
Papier Poudre
wipe, trying to render her skin the desirable, pallid complexion of Edwardian
ladies rather than the hideous dark complexion that she and her sisters had
inherited from their father.

‘There’s nothing wrong with your
appearance, Edie,’ her twin sister, Mary said, emerging from their shared
bedroom.  ‘You’re fine-looking.’  Mary looked over her sister’s
shoulder, smiling and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Edith shrugged her sister’s hand
off.  ‘Fine-looking.  Who wants to be
fine-
looking?’  The
twins were polar opposites in looks.  Mary was a natural beauty with fiery
red hair, stunning hazel eyes and a dark complexion; she never saw the need to
constantly titivate and fiddle with her hair or try to look like the plethora
of glamorous women who adorned the postcards stuck to the walls by Edith’s bed.

‘Are you nearly ready?  It’s almost
nine-thirty,’ Mary asked softly.

Edith sighed.  ‘I’ll have to
be.  It won’t do to be fine-looking
and
late for the interview:
I’ll never get the job.’

Mary ran her fingers through Edith’s hair,
gently teasing apart the lank strands.  She leant in and pecked her sister
on the cheek. ‘Let’s go.’

Edith poked her head around the
living-room door.  Their father, in his tatty labourer’s clothes, was
sitting beside the simmering open-fire, smoking a pipe and attempting to repair
one of his boots.  ‘See you later,’ Edith said.

Her father nodded without looking up and
said nothing until Edith reached the front door.  ‘Mary, you want to try
learning from your sister.  About time you paid your way, you two.’

A knowing, conversant glance passed
between the sisters as Edith took a deep breath and opened the door.  A
surge of freezing, winter air rushed at Edith’s face.  She pulled her coat
tight and stepped onto a fresh flight of snow with Mary close by in her
shadow.  The tiny town was even more still and calm than usual.  The
swathes of white snow, which had steadily fallen for the past three days, seemed
to mute every flicker of life.

The Mercers lived in a small stone cottage
in Winchelsea, a town whose former glory days as the premier Cinque Port,
taking pride of place on the Sussex coast, were long since over.  For
hundreds of years the townsfolk had quietly watched the coast recede from view,
taking with it the reliance upon the sea.  Gone were the mariners, seamen,
rope-makers, shipbuilders, tradesmen, sailors and coastguards, replaced with
labourers, farmers and domestic servants.

Mary pulled her coat tight.  ‘Bloody
hell, that’s cold,’ she whispered with a giggle.

‘Shh, or you’ll get us both shot,’ Edith
said with a glance over her shoulder.

Mary pushed herself into her sister’s
side, as icy winds scooped great squalls of fresh snow up from the low-lying
fields to the exposed streets.  ‘He can’t hear us.  What’s he in such
a foul mood for anyway?’ Mary asked.

‘The usual—this weather means no work on
the farm, which means we’re relying on the pittance Mum earns doing the laundry
for Mrs Booth.’

The girls slowly made their way past the
white weather-boarded cottages of Friar’s Road, their shoes crunching the
unblemished snow.  The only signs of Winchelsea’s having a heartbeat
emanated from the wispy bands of smoke rising and dancing from the chimneys of
each house that they passed, lacing the air with the scent of charred wood.

‘Curse this wretched wind,’ Edith snapped,
nudging her sister away and grasping her hair at the sides.  ‘I’ll look
like such a state when I get there.’

‘Why do you care so much about your
appearance?  They’re employing you as a housemaid, not a music hall star.’

Edith’s cheeks tinged with an
almost-imperceptible crimson but it was enough for her twin to identify as a
flush of embarrassment.  ‘I just want to look my best, that’s all.’

Mary stopped, mouth agape in mock
astonishment.  ‘Edith Jane Mercer!  You’ve got a fancy man working at
Blackfriars!  Is that why you want to work all the hours God sends as a
housemaid?’

Edith ignored her sister and continued
walking, her head turned indignantly to one side.  ‘I’ve got no such
thing,’ she muttered.

Mary skipped along the frozen ground until
she was a step ahead of her twin.  ‘What’s his name, then?  Not
Charles?  You don’t want to be a gardener’s wife do you?  Or is it
Jack Maslow?  He is very handsome,’ Mary giggled.

‘There’s nobody,’ Edith replied
indignantly, pretending to be absorbed by the bare wintry branches of passing
trees.

Mary grasped Edith’s arm.  ‘Tell me,
Edie,’ she said, a subtle seriousness to her tone.

Edith stopped and stared at her
sister.  A pregnant pause passed.  ‘I think Edward has his eye on me,
that’s all.  Nothing more.  No salacious gossip.  No
courtship.  No
fancy man.
’

Mary frowned.  ‘
Cousin
Edward?’

‘What other Edwards do you know?’

‘But…’ Mary began.

‘But what?  What will the family
say?  I don’t care what anyone says or thinks.  You’re allowed to
marry your cousin.  They need to stop being so
Victorian
,’ Edith
said heatedly.

Mary mumbled something under her breath,
as she was so accustomed to doing when her sister annoyed her.  In past
quarrels, Edith would usually have taken the bait and asked her sister to
repeat what she had said.  On this occasion she held her tongue.

 The girls continued walking in
silence, the only sound being the sporadic surge of snowy wind coursing through
the trees.

‘Does he feel the same?’ Mary enquired
softly, watching as her shoes pressed perfectly into the fresh powder.

‘I don’t know.  Maybe.  Just
leave it, will you, Mary?’ Edith retorted.

 The twins wordlessly trudged towards
the dark entrance gates of Blackfriars, an icy wind carrying with it a fresh
flurry of snow, only adding to the chill steadily permeating the sisters’
clothing.

Edith stopped at the open gates, took a
deep, chilly breath and began to walk towards the mansion with Mary a short
distance behind her.

‘Do you remember when we were little
girls, sitting in our bedroom pretending we were Lord and Lady Rothborne?’ Mary
asked with a smile, hoping to thaw the atmosphere between them.

‘We were young and silly,’ Edith retorted,
turning her attention to the large friary, which had at last come into
view.  The girls had been to the property on numerous prior occasions when
locals were invited by the benevolent hosts to tea dances, fêtes and charity
functions in the vast acres of Blackfriars.  Despite their familiarity,
whenever they saw the creamy-yellow Caen-stone building they were left in awe
and wonderment at what went on inside such a grand place.  Their cousin,
Edward, had worked at the property as a footman for a number of years and had
spoken of Blackfriars as if it were some exotic creature.  He had often
told them of the great extravagancies which took place there.  He had
described the sumptuous balls and elaborate birthday parties with such detail
as to fill the sisters with a deep envy.

The girls neared the grand entrance where
fresh snow had begun to settle on the swept stone steps.  Remembering what
she had been told, Edith veered away from the front door.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful just to waltz in
through the front door?’ Mary said.

Edith didn’t answer, making her way over
to the side entrance to a plain wooden door.  With a short, cursory glance
at Mary, she knocked on the wrought-iron ring and waited.

A great puff of warm air, laced with a
morning’s baking, wafted past Edith’s face as the door was pulled open. 
Standing in full smart uniform was Mrs Cuff, the housekeeper, with whom the
twins were acquainted from the village.  She was a tall lady with a
friendly, hospitable face.  Her dark hair was pulled neatly into a bun at
the back of her head.  ‘Come in, girls,’ she said, standing aside to allow
them in.

Edith and Mary stepped into the welcome
embrace of the large kitchen, bustling with domestic servants busily performing
their duties.  The chef, a rotund man with a strong French accent and
little knowledge of the English language, was barking orders at three kitchen
maids who scuttled around the room like terrified mice.

An impromptu smile crept up on Edith, as
for the first time in her life, she felt that she belonged:
destiny
wanted her to become a part—a small part, she knew—in the carefully
orchestrated running of Blackfriars House.  She had plans, definite, firm
plans which would see her rise through the ranks of the household staff. 
If she worked diligently, which she was certainly not afraid of doing, she
would be promoted to second, then first housemaid, then lady’s maid and would
eventually become a close confidante of Lady Rothborne.  In years to come,
she could be the housekeeper—the highest ranking female member of staff—and
she
would be the one to welcome new applicants to the post of third
housemaid.  She knew the job would be arduous with long hours and few
breaks but she would be paid the handsome sum of twenty pounds per year—far and
above anything she had ever earned before.  Finally, she would have the
independence that she craved.

‘I’ll take your coats, girls,’ Mrs Cuff
said, extending her arm expectantly.  ‘I’ll take you to Her Ladyship
momentarily.’

Handing over their cold, damp coats, the
girls stood awkwardly and watched the comings and goings of the staff, who
seemed entirely oblivious to the new arrivals’ presence, each engrossed in
executing their own duties.

Mrs Cuff disappeared with the coats,
returning moments later.  ‘Ready, Miss Mercer?’

Edith inhaled slowly, delighting in her
new title. 
Miss Mercer. 
All the years of slaving for her
mother and quietly absorbing the mechanisms of running a household had led to
this moment. 
Miss Mercer, third housemaid at Blackfriars of
Winchelsea, Sussex. 
With a slight nod of the head, Edith moved across
the kitchen.  ‘I’ve never been more ready, Mrs Cuff.’

Mary, standing unobtrusively at the edge
of the room, went to wish her sister luck, but before she knew it, Edith had
been enveloped into the depths of the house without so much as a glance back at
her twin.  A few years ago Mary might have been irritated at her sister’s
indifference but, for some time since, Mary was growing used to her sister’s
increasing aloofness and detachment.  She supposed that was just what
happened to twins as they grew up and wanted to assert and be known for their
own personalities.

Mary looked blithely around the kitchen,
wondering at the uses of the implements, pots and pans hanging from giant hooks
around the room.  To her, many of them looked like instruments of
torture.  A myriad iron pipes of varying sizes led from a giant black
range, leading to goodness only knew where.  A huge copper pot, larger
than anything that she had ever seen before, caught her attention.  She
went over to it, almost mesmerised by its splendour.  It was so perfectly
shiny and smooth that she could see her own curious face staring back at
her.  As she stared at the distorted bronzed-hued reflection, Mary
suddenly became aware of the stillness of the kitchen.  The orders had
stopped and the maids had all vanished.

A stark shadow passed behind her and she
felt hot putrid breath on her neck.  She turned quickly to see the chef’s
quizzical face glaring at her.

‘
Prends ça à la bibliotèque,
maintenant!
’ he barked.

Mary froze, staring at his harsh features,
only understanding fragments of his order. The chef thrust a steaming silver
coffee pot towards her.

‘
Prends
!’ he repeated, his cold
eyes swelling intensely. ‘
Tiens!
’