Free Blood Atonement by Dan Waddell Page B

itinerant.’
    ‘Hmm,’ Nigel said, pulling at his bottom lip in thought.
    Something wasn’t right. He could sense it. Of course, he’d come across similar entries in the past. But rarely when both husband and wife were unaware of their birthplace.
    ‘You’re not convinced?’ Heather asked.
    ‘Well, there are many explanations. There’s every chance they really didn’t know where they were born. It’s just odd for that to apply to both of them. And it gets even odder when you factor in their marriage certificate — no names for either of their fathers. Of course, they could both be illegitimate; they are adopted, taken in by others, and they don’t know their original place of birth.’
    ‘You can’t say they had nothing in common.’
    ‘No, exactly. They could have met in the workhouse, or
    some other place, discovered they shared a similar upbringing and that brought them together.’
    ‘Actually sounds quite sweet. Love against the odds and
    all that.’ She flipped a fallen curl of dark hair out of her right eye and surveyed him. ‘But I see you don’t agree.’
    ‘It’d be the first time I’ve come across something like it, but that’s not to say it didn’t happen. And yet… you’d think one of them would declare the village, town or city they were eventually raised in, even if they weren’t aware of where they were born. Or that one of them might enter the name of their adoptive father, if there was one.
    Both of them having similar gaps in their memory just,
    well, it strikes me as a bit suspicious, to be honest.’
    You think they deliberately left out those details?’
    ‘The census was deeply unpopular among some people;
    the Victorian equivalent of Middle England thought it
    was a gross intrusion into their private lives. People gave away as little as possible because they were scared how the information might be used. That’s one explanation. But there’s also another, slightly less principled one.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘They were running away and didn’t want to be found.
    Four months after they were married their child was born.
    Sarah was only eighteen. Of course we can only speculate, but it’s not too much of a leap to imagine that one set of parents might not have been too happy with the prospect, tried to get in the way, and that Horton and Sarah eloped to a new place and tried to cover their tracks. Lied about their names and deliberately obscured their birthplaces.’
    ‘That’s even sweeter,’ Heather added, tongue wedged
    firmly in her cheek. ‘It has a Montague/Capulet thing
    going on. Perhaps Horton was from the wrong side of
    the tracks. She was the eldest daughter of a rich pompous landowner, he the horny-handed son of toil…’
    ‘There’s a future for you in romantic novels.’
    ‘I’d hope I’m better at it in fiction than I am in real life,’
    she added.
    There was a silence. She stared at him with a look he
    couldn’t fathom. Wistfulness? Regret? He didn’t know.
    Was he supposed to say something here? He couldn’t find
    the words. After a few agonizing seconds in which unsaid
    words and feelings hung between them like a veil, Heather switched back to the topic at hand.
    ‘But if these two have disappeared pre1891, what can
     
    we do?’
    ‘There’s any number of things I can do, but they might
    all take some time,’ he said, glad to be on steadier ground.
    ‘In the meantime, we can take Sarah Rowley as the starting point and trace as many descendants of hers as possible to give you something to start working on.’
    Heather agreed. The rest of the day was taken up with
    that task. By the close, Nigel was able to hand her a small list of maternal cousins. One, a Gillian Stamey, died three years ago (a suicide aged thirty-six), while another elderly woman, Edith Chapman, died five years ago. The living females were Naomi Buckingham, Leonie Stamey, Rachel
    Stamey, Lucy Robinson and Louise Robinson. The latter,
    mother and daughter, appeared to have