Free Death be Not Proud by C F Dunn

reasonable stop me now?
    I racked my memory for the name of the parish Richardson had come from. My grandfather had completed a great deal of background research on him, so it would have to be somewhere in the paperwork he left me all those years ago. This was the right time frame and the right region and the possibilities were narrowing all the time, but the parish eluded me. I would have to start from the only other reference point I had and work forwards.
    â€œBlast this,” I muttered crossly, rolling the chair forward onto its front legs so it thumped on the thin commercial carpet, and whacked in: “Parish records, Cambridge, Rutland, Stamford, Lynes, 1550 to 1650.”
    And there it was – the first reference to the Lynes lay in a series of names and dates in an obscure county record for Rutland.
    â€œOf course! Twit!” I admonished myself out loud. Rutland was a small county, and the parish of Martinsthorpe had few occupants even then – no wonder it hadn’t loomed large in my memory. I read down the list, looking for clues:
    Marg’t Lynes b 1584 d 1611 formerly Fielding
    Name unreadable possibly Lynes b 1609
    Infant d 1611
    Henry Lynes b 1577 d 1646?
    William Lynes b 1586 d 1643
    The records were incomplete – a footnote stated that information had been purposefully expunged, or damaged through flood or age.
    I started with presuming that either Henry or William had been married to Margaret – and that represented a guess at this stage – and that the infant was their child and probably a victim of the very high mortality rates among newborns. Given the contemporaneous date of death, I thought it reasonable to suppose that the mother’s death related to birth complications, possibly puerperal fever.
    It was a start.
    The expunged name posed more of a problem. The interesting question for me as a historian was why ? The footnotes didn’t amplify. If this was also a Lynes child, it might have been the older sibling by two years. Or someone completely unrelated. Whoever had researched the records, obviously believed there to be a relationship by the very proximity of the names they had transcribed. No date of death had been recorded, so presumably this person died in another parish, or was a suicide.
    William Lynes died in the 1640s, so that wouldn’t be so much of a problem to trace; perhaps William and Henry were related – brothers? Uncle and nephew? Cousins?
    I homed in on the scanty parish records for Martinsthorpe, but came up with the same list of names. Margaret seemed to be related to the Fieldings who held a nearby manor atthat time, although her relationship to them wasn’t clear; that might be another line to follow, but not now, not yet.
    I heard voices in the corridor outside and checked my watch: 4.55 – the museum would be packing up for the night. I clicked on the “Print” button and hoped for the best. From somewhere beneath a mountain of unfiled papers, came the familiar whirr of a printer starting up. I zeroed in on the noise, retrieving the single sheet from the machine as Judy entered the room in a multicoloured wave of cloth, beaded tassels at the edge of her skirt jiggling as she swayed through the door.
    â€œSorry to have been so long. Any luck?”
    I folded the page and put it in my bag.
    â€œI have a lead of some sort; I don’t know where it’s going but it’s more than I had when I came here. Thanks so much for your help and for giving me access to the database.” I kissed her on the cheek and she blushed.
    â€œNot at all, love; it’s what I’m here for, and glad I could help. I’ll see you out and then I’m off to meet my husband; he’s a historian as well. Funny lot you all are.” And she laughed happily.
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    The sun had just set, the roofs of the buildings silhouetted against the pale salmon sky to the west. It threatened to be cold again and I made my way home as