The Widow’s Secret, page 3
Until it had been struck off.
“How has this come to pass?” she asked as she watched her mother fuss around the room, as she often did when she was either anxious or excited, picking up a tasselled pillow and putting it down again, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from the arm of a chair.
“What does it matter how it has come to pass? It matters simply that it has.” Caroline gave her what Abigail suspected was meant to be an airy smile. “Now what should you wear? I think your pink robe is lovely, but perhaps a bit too summery for the season. I shall have to have Jensen iron your new petticoat. She must take care with the frills –”
“Mama.” Abigail’s voice came out in a strident command, and Caroline’s fluttering stilled.
“My dear –”
“How has this come to pass?” she repeated, her tone demanding an answer. “I have not been invited to a single occasion since we returned to Whitehaven in September, and well you know it.”
Mother and daughter stared at each other for a long moment before Caroline looked away. “Abigail, your stubbornness shall surely be the demise of all our hopes.”
Their hopes, Abigail rather thought, had already come to an end. “I would like to know.”
“What does it matter?” Caroline repeated. “You are invited and you must go. There will be many gentlemen in attendance…”
All of whom had already passed her over as a potential wife, or with whom she would be out of favour regardless, thanks to a single moment’s indiscretion while taking the waters in the north’s only spa town.
“It matters,” Abigail said in a hard voice, “because I thought it impossible. What have you done?”
“I? I have done nothing –”
“Papa, then.”
A look of guilt flashed across her mother’s face, rendering her like a child for a moment, and Abigail steeled herself. What new indignity would she have to face now? She’d already had her behaviour raked over in every genteel parlour in Whitehaven, her shame whispered and tittered about behind far too many manicured hands.
“Your father agreed to buy into John Tamworth’s latest venture,” Caroline finally said. “He’s had trouble obtaining investors. Tobacco is all going into Glasgow these days, and the rest, it seems, to Mr Martin.” Mr Martin, Abigail knew, had the majority of the tobacco trade in Whitehaven, and had for some years. “It is uncommonly hard for a man to make his fortune when there are so many others vying for the same trade.”
Abigail sat heavily in a chair by the fire, barely noticing its comforting, if negligible, warmth.
“And you said this musical evening was at the Tamworths’?” she recalled quietly.
“Indeed, yes. But what does it matter how you procured the invitation, Abigail? Surely the thing is that you will be in attendance –”
“Everyone will be whispering about how I procured it. My father had to buy it for me.” She could not quite keep the sharp edge of bitterness from her tone.
“Your father made an investment, that is all –”
“That he wouldn’t have made otherwise?”
“Let us not descend to talking of business! It’s so common.”
“You know the truth of it, Mama,” Abigail said despairingly. How could she walk into that evening with everyone knowing how she had come to be there?
“Even so,” Caroline protested, hands fluttering at her sides once more. “Even so, my dear –”
“It won’t make any difference to my prospects, Mama. Surely you can see that.” Over the last six months, there had been no talk among her family, not even a whisper, of her being ruined; her parents had too many hopes for their longed-for and much-awaited only child to use a word such as that.
It had all been bright, breezy chatter about how things blew over – how this time next year people wouldn’t even remember Harrogate. Her father had blustered that in any case he thought the town was going to seed; its purging waters smelled so dreadful, who in their right mind would want to take a glass? Next year they would try Tunbridge Wells, or even Bath.
All of it had made Abigail ache with both guilt and regret; she could suffer her own great disappointment in silence, but to face her parents’, day after endless day, and all for a naive mistake she’d made, believing a man was a gentleman simply because he’d held a title. What a fool she’d been. What a silly little fool.
“Abigail…” Caroline knotted her hands together at her waist, her chilblained knuckles swollen and red. “Please don’t make a fuss about this. Your papa has gone to such effort.”
“I won’t make a fuss.” Abigail forced a smile even though her heart felt like a stone inside her. She could not refuse her parents an occasion to hope, even if it all came to nothing, as it surely would. “And I think I shall wear the rose.”
“Oh, thank you, my dear! It does suit you.”
It did not, but Abigail forewent saying such a thing. Her mother was pleased, and that was all that mattered. She could endure an evening of acute embarrassment for that. Although how excruciating it would be she did not realize, until Caroline added happily, “And you’ll take part, of course. I told the Tamworths that you would sing ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill’, with their daughter Georgiana accompanying on the pianoforte.”
“Mama, you didn’t!” Abigail stared at her mother in dismay. “You know I can barely carry a tune.”
“Nonsense, you sing very well. And you must perform, Abigail. All the young ladies will.”
Abigail shook her head, knowing there was no point in protesting. The thing was already done; to refuse now would be nearly as bad as the performance surely would be. Still, the evening, which had, to her own shame, shimmered with the faintest promise of interest despite all her pragmatic assertions, had now lost all its lustre, and was only something to dread.
The next evening Abigail walked into the murmuring crowds of the Tamworths’ house on Argyll Street, lifting her chin and trying not to notice the various stares and whispers – just as she was trying not to be aware of how ill-suited she was to wear a robe of pale pink with a petticoat underneath sporting far too many ruffles. Her mother insisted on choosing what she considered to be the very latest fashions for her, even though Abigail knew her square jaw and straight body did not do well with such an excess of frills and lace.
The shade of pink, so becoming on a young woman with fair or dark hair, clashed impressively with Abigail’s auburn. She suspected her mother chose it as a wilful denial that the shade of her thick and unmanageable locks was anything close to ginger, just as she’d insisted Jensen, the maid of all work who helped them dress, should powder her hair and fashion it into a towering style, even though Abigail suspected it was going out of date. She felt ridiculous, but she still attempted to walk with pride.
The two parlours on the Tamworths’ first floor were full of Whitehaven’s polite society, everyone murmuring and mingling, and Abigail recognized nearly all of those in attendance, just as she recognized that each and every one would have heard of her indiscretion at Harrogate; the whispers had travelled all the way over the fells, turnpike road or not.
Now she smiled at one acquaintance, and then another, their dressed hair and fine clothes blurring in front of her proud stare. Next to her, Caroline fluttered nervously, caught between anxiety and excitement, so wanting this evening to be a success when Abigail knew it would be anything but. And, she acknowledged wryly, she hadn’t even sung yet. That humiliation, at least, would be saved until later.
“The Tamworths…” Caroline murmured, looking rather wildly around the room for the family purported to be their social saviours. Their generosity, however, did not seem to extend to socializing, for when Abigail caught Georgiana’s eye, the young woman, thought soon to be engaged to the Jeffersons’ second son, turned away.
It was like that. It was, Abigail reflected, always like that, no matter how hard her parents tried, how determined they were. Her grandfather had been a husbandman with fewer than forty acres; their beginnings were humble, and even though most of Whitehaven’s merchant class had similar stories, the Heywoods had somehow never quite risen above the stink of the sheep pen next to the house. In fact, even now her father’s warehouse was attached to their home, just as many other merchants’ were, with a door between them.
Since the summer, her parents’ determination had given way to desperation, and that only made things worse. If Abigail had had some small chance of procuring a husband of some description before the summer, it had faded to insignificance since because of her parents’ obvious contrivances, as well as her own woeful misfortune.
The evening was, just as she’d expected, endless. They remained on the edge of the room, sipping lukewarm tea and straining to hear the nearby idle chatter and gossip. Abigail only hoped her own name was not mentioned.
Her father, at least, had been spared this embarrassment; he had gone into another room, with the other fathers and older sons, to talk business out of the ladies’ hearing. Trade, it thankfully seemed, was not affected overmuch by society’s whims.
At least when the music began, she had something to divert her attention, as well as everyone else’s away from her; the assembly of guests seemed to spend an excess of energy in being seen to ignore her.
Of course, there was her own unfortunate rendition to suffer through. Abigail knew her parents were proud of her mediocre accomplishments; like her needlework, singing was not something she professed either to enjoy or to excel at, but her doting papa and mama had convinced themselves it was.
Soon enough, it was her turn to stand in front of the narrow-eyed audience, the unfriendly murmurs dying down to a gleefully expectant hush.
Colour surged into Abigail’s cheeks as she stood by the pianoforte, a sullen Georgiana at its keys. She opened her mouth for the first note, unable to keep from wincing at its flat sound. Heaven help her, why did her mother put her through such a torturous exercise? Not to mention the torture visited on the gathered listeners.
Still Abigail kept singing, her head held high, her chin tilted as if daring anyone to titter behind their hands. “I’d crowns resign to call thee mine,” she sang, and then nearly faltered as her gaze, focused blankly ahead, suddenly caught on a smile in the corner of the room – the glimmer of something other than indifference, vindictive glee, or pity.
It was a man, a gentleman Abigail didn’t recognize, with hair a similar shade to her own, unpowdered and queued in the back. He wore simple clothes: a frock coat in dun brown, buff breeches, and rather weathered boots. And he was smiling at her.
Abigail nearly stuttered in her wretched song as she met his gaze; the colour of his eyes was startlingly bright. Unlike hers, which were the muddy murk of low tide, his were the dazzling blue of the windswept sea. Or so she would describe them if she were writing a romantic novel, but she’d never considered herself one for such silly notions off the written page.
Yet when he smiled, that tiny quirk of the corner of his mouth, she suddenly felt like laughing. She saw a look in his eyes, in his small smile, that made her feel as if she were sharing a joke rather than being for ever the butt of it.
And so Abigail straightened her spine as she sang, her voice soaring over the gathered assembly, its oft-faltering notes seeming, for once, as clear and pure as a lark’s, as her gaze moved over the gathered assembly and then, inevitably, back to that of the smiling gentleman.
CHAPTER THREE
Rachel
Rachel rubbed her eyes wearily as she took a sip of her now-cold coffee. She’d spent the last hour on her laptop in the museum’s little café, trying to find a match for the heart-shaped implement whose use she still hadn’t figured out. Of course, knowing the provenance of the ship it had been on would have helped, but she wouldn’t know that until the day after tomorrow, when her colleagues Ally and Dave joined her for a preliminary dive.
So far she hadn’t come across anything online that looked like it, but she’d been distracted by various internet searches into the history of shipping in Whitehaven, scrolling through the online archives for ship registers, only to discover she would have to travel to Carlisle to look at them, and in any case she already knew the records didn’t start until 1786, when ships had been required by law to register with a Customs House, which could very well be too late.
There were, of course, the National Archives in Kew, which would have outport records and customs collections for the period in question, as well as the local archives, which would have various records of merchant ships, but until she had more information, Rachel knew she could spend hours if not days or even weeks squinting at endless pages and reels of microfiche, looking for she knew not what. She needed more information about the wreck before she started trawling through various archives.
Next to her laptop her phone buzzed, and Rachel glanced at the name on the screen. Anthony. She hesitated, then turned her phone over. She’d call him later, from the B&B she’d booked into in the nearby village of Goswell, when she had some privacy, and the time and space to chat, although she still didn’t know what she’d say.
She shut her laptop, trying not to feel dispirited. She couldn’t really do much more today; she had meetings with Mark James of Cumbria’s Historic Environment Service and Will Sayers, the liaison for the Copeland Mining Company, tomorrow, and until she talked to them, she was stuck.
Rachel suspected what both of them would say. As interesting as this could be, there are thousands of wrecks off the coast. Unless you can find the money…
With a sigh she slipped her laptop into her bag before rising from her chair and rolling her shoulders, which were tense from sitting hunched over for the last hour.
Giving a fleeting smile of farewell to the woman at the counter, Rachel headed back out to the harbourside. Now that evening was approaching, the damp Cumbrian chill in the air was noticeable, creeping beneath her fleece-lined windbreaker. She remembered it well from her childhood, along with the endless wind, constantly buffeting her as she walked along, rattling the windowpanes at night as she huddled in bed, her duvet pulled up to her chin, the house silent and empty all around her. Cumbria was a beautiful place, but as far as Rachel was concerned, the weather was terrible.
Now she hunched her shoulders against the wind off the harbour as she walked back to her car.
She could, of course, take the opportunity to visit her mother, especially if she wasn’t going to be staying in the area all that long. Yet Rachel resisted the notion, as she so often did, because her relationship with her mother was prickly at best, and often downright distant. If her father were still alive…
But that was a train of thought she never let herself entertain, because it was so pointless and so sad. She hated the way it made her feel, as if an emptiness were whistling through her. It had been twenty-five years since her father died, and it still hurt, a wound that never truly healed, a scab she kept picking at despite her best intentions not to.
Pushing thoughts of her parents aside, Rachel decided to take a walk through Whitehaven and enjoy its crumbling Georgian charms. Although having lived only a little more than an hour away, she’d never visited the town, and despite the damp chill in the air, she was looking forward to exploring more; perhaps she’d even discover something of use to the shipwreck, although admittedly that possibility seemed slight.
Still, it was fascinating to think that the owner of the wreck had almost certainly walked these streets, and perhaps even lived in one of the elegant townhouses she was walking by now.
Rachel headed down the town’s main thoroughfare, the appropriately named Lowther Street. She’d already learned that the Lowther family had engineered the development of the town over three hundred years ago, with a Georgian grid of streets that New York and other American cities had been allegedly modelled on.
She was idly inspecting the window fronts of various shops when, next to a pretty flower shop, she stopped in front of a sign for a museum – The Rum Story, “the dark spirit of Whitehaven”, about its association with the shipping of rum and its dependence on the slave trade.
Intrigued, she headed down the little alleyway that led to a courtyard café and the entrance of the museum. She was just glancing at some rusted manacles in a display on the wall when a woman from behind the till spoke.
“I’m sorry, we’re just about to close,” she said with a grimace of apology.
“Oh, are you?” Disappointment swooped inside her and Rachel stepped closer to a glass cabinet near the till filled with curios of the slave trade – a rusted neck collar, some clay beads used for trading, a scrap of a ship’s log detailing the number of human losses.
“Yes, but we open again tomorrow at ten. You’re welcome to come then.”
“Right.” Rachel’s gaze trained in on one of the items in the case: what looked like a pair of pliers – with a heart-shaped handle. Her heart felt as if it were expanding in her chest, and then squeezing hard. “Sorry,” she said quickly to the attendant who was clearly trying not to seem impatient, “I’m in Whitehaven investigating a shipwreck and I just thought I might have…” She trailed off as she peered closer at the implement, and then glanced at the little plaque beneath, explaining what it was: “A speculum oris, used to force open the jaws of slaves so they were not able to starve themselves while on board ship.”
A frisson of horror ran through her at the grim thought. That innocent-looking heart, used for such an inhumane and evil act. But it meant that the shipwreck could very well have been a slave ship, with undoubted historical significance.
“I’m sorry, miss, but I really do need to close up now.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Rachel nodded, her gaze surveying the double doors of dark glass that led into the museum; she couldn’t see anything beyond them. “Yes, I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Back outside she headed for her car, deciding there was no point wandering around any longer. She’d check into the B&B, get something to eat, and see if she could find out more about the slave trade of Whitehaven. She hadn’t even realized that Whitehaven, such a small, remote town, had once had a slave trade. She’d assumed that the trade had stayed in the more major ports of Bristol, Liverpool, and London. But if that heart-shaped handle really was part of a speculum oris…
