Ether & Elephants (18 page)

“Let’s walk.”

Nell had already let herself out of the car.

Tom caught up to her in a few quick strides, before she’d had the chance to turn one way or the other in front of the pub. “Left.” He took her arm and steered her in that direction. “I can’t believe we never found her mother before. I swear, I thought I’d investigated as thoroughly as possible.”

“Perhaps the time just wasn’t right.” She’d wondered much the same, but in the past few days had begun to take a more fatalistic point of view. “But also, you didn’t have as many different sources of information then. It’s where those paths cross that we found the clues pointing us here. Without Wink’s engines, without Professor Wiggins, without knowing about the prince—” she dropped her voice to a whisper on the last word “—we’d never have come to the conclusions we did.”

“I could have checked with the other publicans. In fact, I swear I did.” His walk was stilted, letting her know how hard it was to slow himself to her pace. Too bad. He could suffer. She wasn’t ill-bred enough to run on a public street and she wasn’t feeling that sympathetic toward him.

She wasn’t totally without heart so she squeezed his arm. “I’m sure you did. And they may have given different answers back then, especially to a young man, unaccompanied.” She gazed around, taking in as many details as she could of the street. It was a poor one, but not filthy like the ones in Wapping. This was genteel poverty. Polly hadn’t likely needed to whore or steal to keep a roof over her head or food on the table. “There’s no use fretting about it now. The real concern isn’t about you, anyway. You made your bed. We’re here investigating abducted children and a possible threat to the crown. Don’t forget it.”

“Of course.” He didn’t speak again until he rapped on the door of one of the smallest cottages and a thin, pale woman with tired eyes and lanky gray hair opened the door. “Mrs. Landers?”

The woman studied Tom and Nell with a gaze that was sharp despite her careworn appearance. “Who wants to know?”

“My name is Sir Thomas Devere—”

“He’s—we’re—from Whitehall,” Nell interrupted. “And we need to ask you some questions.” Mrs. Landers had the look of a woman who recognized two things—authority and money. Fortunately Nell and Tom were equipped with both.

Landers’s eyes widened. “Oy. I guess you’d better come in.” She stepped back and held open the door. “I’d offer you tea, but I’m fresh out.”

“Not to worry, ma’am. We’ve only just eaten.” Tom had apparently decided to take the role of the kindly official, leaving the dirty work to Nell.

She gave a snide little smile, in keeping with the snooty civil servant persona. In this instance, that suited her just fine. She looked around the room and sniffed. “May we sit down, at least?”

“Right.” Landers brushed off a couple of chairs at her small table in front of a coal fire and plopped down into a third. “What’s this all about?”

“We have some questions about your daughter.” Tom smiled kindly again. “Polly Berrycloth
is
your daughter, is she not?”

Landers snorted. “I suppose, if that’s her name now. Polly, Paula, Pauline, even
Apollonia
.” She said the last with a sneering attempt at an upper-class accent. “She was born plain Mary Landers, but her dad called her Poll. She was maybe ten when she stopped answering to the other altogether and started making up la-di-dah monikers for herself. Always said she was going places. I figured she’d wind up in a high-class whorehouse, but she married that no-good Mr. Berrycloth.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Berrycloth?” In her role as stern inquisitor, Nell snapped the question. She pulled a small notepad and a silver pencil from her handbag and poised herself to take notes. “To start with, what was his given name?” The man who witnessed Tom’s marriage had signed
Alfred Barrowclough
.

“Algernon,” Mrs. Landers said with a sniff. “Never Algie nor Al, always
Algernon.
” Again she mimicked an educated drawl. “Met him in the tavern, fleecing other men with card tricks, but he acted as though his shit didn’t stink. Polly fell for him like a ton of bricks. He was going to lift her out of poverty, she said, though I didn’t see how. For all his grand ideas and schemes, for all he was supposedly some highfaluting scientist, far as I could see, he was nothing but a two-bit trickster. Never had a farthing to his name.”

Nell’s gaze flew upward to meet Tom’s. His jaw was taught and his cheeks were pale. This was it. They definitely had their man. She coughed to keep her voice from catching. “Mrs. Landers, do you know whether they were legally wed? And if so, when?”

“Aye, it were legal enough. Reverend Corbin never broke a law or commandment in his stuffy old life.” Polly’s mother scrunched up her nose and scratched the tip. “Right about 1853, I suppose. She’d’ve been sixteen, where he was closer to thirty-five. Always figured she were knocked up, but if she were, she got rid of it. Never had a baby that I knew about, except that poor little one who died.”

“Good heavens,” Nell whispered while Tom swallowed convulsively. Tom was unmarried. Polly definitely had been wed to Berrycloth when she went through all those other ceremonies, including the one with Tom.

All of the years of heartache, for Tom and her, the complete and utter destruction of all her girlhood hopes and dreams, had been for nothing. Nausea curdled in her stomach.

“What church did she marry in?” Tom’s voice was stretched thin with the effort it must have taken him to maintain control. “Is the reverend living?”

“Right here in Gander.” Mrs. Landers snorted. “Back in those days, she came around, still pretended to give a damn about her old mum. Reverend Corbin, he’d baptized her, and she wanted him to see her wed. I think she just wanted to show off to the whole village what a flash cove she’d landed. No expenses spared. He must have had a run of luck.”

“And the vicar?” Having found out most of what they’d come for, Nell dropped her stern façade and prodded gently. “Is he still alive?”

Landers harrumphed. “Nah. Died two, three years ago. But his nephew was the curate, and he has the living now. He might remember. Had a thing for Poll himself, just like half the men in Gander.”

Nell sensed Tom’s anxiousness to leave, but she had a few more questions. “Mrs. Landers, do you happen to have a photograph of Mr. Berrycloth?”

“Aye.” She jerked a thumb at a shelf where a wedding portrait was half buried under scraps of cloth. “Spared no expense, like I said.”

“May we take that with us?” This time, Nell let a little resonance into her voice. It wasn’t quite compulsion, but she’d learned it was a persuasive quality. “We’ll make sure you get it back, but it could help us catch Mr. Berrycloth before he commits any further crimes.”

“Wouldn’t mind selling it, if it came to that. Sewing don’t pay what it used to.” The older woman shot a wink at Tom.

“I think I can manage a few quid.” He winked back, though his skin was sallow and drawn. “The baby that died, when was that? Boy or girl?”

“Hmm. Got a picture of him, too. Might be worth a couple more quid, eh?” Landers began to rifle though the stack of odds and ends on the shelf behind her. “Here it is. Little Charlemagne Berrycloth, though Poll called him Charlie. Hell of a moniker for a little one, ain’t it? Born April first, 1855. Big lad. Weighed a good ten pounds. Poll and that bastard fair doted on him till he got sick and lost his sight before he died. That’s the last I saw of her, when they came here to tell me he was dead. Only four years old, poor chap.”

There was the final confirmation they’d needed. Tom pulled a handful of banknotes from his pocket. “I’ll see you get the photographs returned, Mrs. Landers. Thank you so much for your help. What did you say was the name of the new vicar?”

“Elgin Rook. Rectory is right next to the church.” She stared at the small fortune in her hands, barely looking up as they left the tiny house.

Neither Tom nor Nell spoke a word until they were back in the relative privacy of the car. Nell held the two precious photographs in her gloved hands. “Let’s go get the church record, then get back to London as quickly as possible.”

“You go talk to the vicar.” Tom’s hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t seem to start the car. “I’ll walk up to the pub and telephone Wink. With what we know now, she might have the records in her database.”

Nell couldn’t argue. If he was delegating such an important task, he must be in rough shape. “Whatever you say, Tommy.” She winced. It had been years since she called him that.

“Thanks, Nelly.” He let out a long, shaky breath. “The boy isn’t mine.” His voice held a blend of relief and regret, not the elation a more callous man might have felt.

“No.” Nell was none too sure of her own feelings, either. “If he was born in April, he’d have to have been a seven-month baby, and he wouldn’t have weighed ten pounds, would he?”

“I don’t think so, though I never paid much attention to those kinds of details with the littles. How much did Will weigh? I don’t think it was that much.”

“Seven and a half.” Nell had relished her role as mother’s helper when her younger siblings had been born, back when she’d first imagined having babies herself one day. Will being the only boy, she could see why Tom asked about him, even though it didn’t matter much at that age. “Rose was close to eight, and she was the biggest. And none of them were so much as a week early.”

“No chance.” Tom shuddered. “All these years, never knowing. And yet he did have a father and a mother, and from the sound of it, they’re alive. How could they have abandoned him, Nell? What kind of monster could do that?”

“I don’t know, dear heart.” Nell swallowed the lump in her throat. “Jamie’s aunt and uncle threw him into the streets because of his visions. None of my mother’s customers made any effort to prevent leaving behind a child. Some people are just…damaged inside. It sounds like they loved Charlie until he became ill and blind, then they discarded him like a broken toy. Something must have made them want him back. I only hope that if they used him for that horrible experiment, his passing was swift. He was a beautiful boy.”

Right there in the car on the side of the lane, she broke into gut-wrenching sobs, clutching the photograph of him as a smiling infant to her breast. Her poor, poor Charlie.

Tom folded her in his arms, awkward though the small confines of the car made the embrace. “Remember,” he said, his voice thick and suspiciously raspy, “our sources say a couple with a boy boarded the ship for India. Why would they take a boy who wasn’t their son? We’ll find him, Nelly. I swear on my life, we’ll find him.”

“You’re right,” she said after the racking sobs had finished. “We have to try, at any rate. I have to know what happened, even if it’s the worst.”

“That’s my girl.” He rubbed the top of her head with his knuckles, completely disarranging her hat and hair. “Let’s go see the vicar, then we’ll go together to the pub. We can phone Wink and catch a meal in one go.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat.” She pulled out her handkerchief and began to scrub at her face. Thank heavens she hadn’t been wearing any cosmetics, or she’d look like a badger.

He handed her a second handkerchief, this one dampened with a bit of cool tea from the flask she’d packed that morning. “We’re probably leaving for India on the morning flight. You need to keep up your strength, love, if you want to be of any use to your Charlie.”

“Brute.” She pressed the tea-infused cloth to her closed eyes. “But you’re right and I’ll forgive you, because this feels divine.”

He accepted the used handkerchief and tossed it behind the seat to be dealt with later. “A trick I learned from Aunt Dorothy, though she used it for tired and strained eyes rather than teary ones.”

“She’s a clever old bird, but not much for such a missish display as weeping.” Nell accepted the flask he handed her and drank down several swallows of cool tea. “Thank you. Now as soon as I straighten my hair, we can go interrogate the vicar.”

Tom chuckled. “Don’t have to sound so pleased about it, you little heathen.”

Nell grinned, her gloom parting like a fog, replaced by her natural optimism. “If I’m a heathen, all you boys are hopelessly bound for damnation.” She adjusted her hairpins and hat as best she could without a mirror. “Come on. Let’s get this over with. I think, perhaps, I am a trifle peckish.”

* * *

They left the vicar’s study full of tea and raisin buns, and in possession of both the marriage lines of Mary “Polly” Landers to one Algernon Charlemagne Berrycloth in the fall of 1853, well before Tom’s matriculation at Cambridge, and the birth record for the couple’s son, also Charlemagne, just like Mrs. Landers had said, on April 1, 1855. A death record for the boy had also been filed for August, 1859, from scarlet fever. Tom couldn’t help but wonder if another hapless child had been buried in Charlie’s stead, or if his coffin was merely filled with sand.

“It’s getting late,” Nell said as he handed her into the car. “Let’s forget supper and head back to London.”

“If you don’t mind.” Since they’d gotten photographs of the records, there wasn’t a rush to have Wink search them out in the database. “I’ll make arrangements for the morning flight, if that’s all right with you.”

“It’s fine.” She took off her hat and rested her head against the seat of the car. “Oddly coincidental that it’s India we’re going to, but now that I have a reason to go there, I must admit, I’m wildly curious. Whenever I’m not thinking about Charlie, I’ll be spending the trip looking around, wondering if any of the men I meet might just be my natural father.”

Tom was getting into murky territory here, but he’d promised Merrick to say nothing until they knew more. In this case, though, his loyalty was to Nell. She deserved better than to be blindsided. “Nelly, there’s something we haven’t told you…”

Her only response was a soft, almost musical snore. Even in sleep, she was melodic. She let out a small whimper and curled deeper into the leather seats.

He didn’t have the heart to wake her. It had been a long and difficult day. Besides, he’d have plenty of time on the two-night airship flight to ease her into the knowledge that he and Merrick had gleaned on her behalf.