Death be Not Proud Read online

  “Thanks – I should’ve put them down first, but you know…”

  She shrugged, surveying her finger. She was from somewhere in Wales – perhaps Cardiff – the soft lilt in her voice not yet diluted by the local accent. She exuded colour from the inside out, her rotund body encased in layers of brightly coloured clothes that clung to every curve. She smiled engagingly, deep dimples on her apple-blossom cheeks. I returned her smile and the papers.

  “Yup, I know; we’ve all done it. My pleasure, anyway.”

  As I handed them back to her, shuffling them in order, the top page caught my eye: a numbered printout in a mind-boggling small font.

  “Is that an archival list?”

  The young woman glanced down at the wad of paper. “Uh, yes – are you looking for something?”

  It was just a chance. “I’m looking for anything on the Lynes family.”

  “Lynes, Lynes.” She juggled with the name for a moment, then shook her head, her shoulder-length hair catching on the collar of purple-sequined embroidery; she pulled it free, the light glinting off the tiny metallic circles. She swam in a sea of colour, and not just her clothes, but her whole personality sparkled with it.

  “It’s not one I’ve heard of, love. Have you any more information – a date, first name, location, occupation – something I can cross-reference?”

  I felt like an idiot, and I should have known better after all the research I had done.

  “Matthew Lynes, possibly around 1900. Location – I’m not too sure, perhaps South Lincolnshire – Cambridge.” I waved my hands vaguely and the curator’s eyes followed the path my cast made in the air. I hid it behind my back and she refocused on my face. Instead of looking impatient – which is what I think I would have done – she looked faintly bemused.

  “I’ll do a search and see what’ll come up on that. Lynes, mmm…” she mused. “It might take some time; have you got a mo?”

  “Ye-es, I have, but I didn’t expect you to do this immediately…”

  “No problem, love; I’m done here and it’s better than filing this lot…” she brandished the papers, wafting warm air towards me, “… or fiddling about with the Neolithic case; those burins and scrapers are so tricky. Follow me, I’ll just get a plaster first, if you don’t mind.” She cheerily led me past an image of Daniel Lambert looking smugly replete on the wall.

  “Researching your family?” she enquired over her shoulder.

  “No – this is work,” I said, evasively.

  “Historian? Genealogist? We get a lot of those here.”

  “Uh huh – historian.”

  She led me down the stairs and along a corridor where one of the ceiling lights flickered intermittently like a moth’s wings against a bare bulb.

  “I wouldn’t normally bring the public here – staff only, you see – but since you’re professional, I reckon it’s OK. Where do you come from?”

  She shoved a door with her foot and held it open for me with her elbow.

  “I’m from Stamford.”

  “Are you? You don’t sound it. Here… sit down; if we can’t find anything, it’s not on the web. We’ve got complete access to all the records available, you see. You’re lucky to find anyone here now. I’m only on loan from Lincoln doing an audit of the collection before it’s mothballed. The museum’s on the hit-list, see; might get the axe.”

  Neither of us commented; we didn’t need to, the very thought of closing the museum abhorrent to both of us for different reasons. I remembered coming here with my grandfather countless times. Summer, winter, rain or snow – all those visits were warm in my memory.

  She dumped the papers on a desk next to a computer monitor, and pulled the keyboard out from underneath a glossy museum periodical. “Lynes, did you say? L-i-n-e-s?”

  “L-y-n-e-s,” I corrected.

  Her fingers sped over the keyboard as I sat down next to her, searching the database. She sucked at her cut finger, regarding the monitor through narrowed eyes.

  “Nothing for Stamford for that date. I’ll widen the search. Hey, can you do this while I grab that plaster?”

  She was out of her chair and across the room, hoicking a green First Aid box out of an overhead cupboard. I dragged the keyboard around in front of me and tapped in the next search parameter.

  “No, nothing for South Kesteven either. I’ll try Cambridgeshire next.”

  It was a long shot and it, too, drew a blank.

  “Fancy a tea, love?”

  The sound of a plastic kettle being filled from a tap in a tiny adjacent room the size of a cupboard, crammed the space for an instant, almost too loud in the small area.

  “Thanks…” My eyes remained fixed on the screen. The curator gathered a couple of mugs from beside me, the remains of the last drinks clinging languidly to their interiors, the liquid slopping as she picked them up.

  “Biscuit?” she asked.

  “I have chocolate in my bag,” I offered.

  I fished out a couple of Kit Kats without looking, tapping in another set of data with one finger. Water sloshed in the mugs in the sink and a faint scent of washing-up liquid drifted. The young woman returned and leaned over my shoulder while drying a mug.

  “Try Northampton – they’ve just digitized their collection,” she suggested.

  The screen hesitated, then coughed up a snazzy home page with interactive links. I scanned through them, opening page after page of irrelevant information.

  “Nope, nothing there either. This is going to be a waste of time without any more information to go on.”

  I scrabbled my hands through my hair, feeling my plait begin to unfurl, and becoming conscious for the first time of a slight numbness in my fingers. I disregarded it and pouted at the machine. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I were working on my own, but I was all too aware of eating into someone else’s time.

  “Naw, love, there’s plenty more where that came from.” She put a mug of steaming tea down next to me. “You’re not supposed to drink in here, but we don’t take any notice. No original documents to worry about, and if they’re closing it down, what does it matter? Do you have an occupation to go on?”

  “Thanks for the tea. Doctor – no, surgeon, but I don’t know when he qualified – or where, for that matter.”

  “Try the National Database for the Royal College of Surgeons – that’s the most comprehensive.”

  This was straying from my own territory; I wasn’t as familiar with the sources for later archive material. She sat on the wheeled office chair, her ample frame spilling comfortably over the edges of the seat, and picked up the remaining Kit Kat, unwrapping it and slicing cleanly through the foil with a fingernail. Mine had already begun to melt in my fingers; I nibbled the chocolate, feeling it dissolve further in the warmth of my mouth.

  “Mmm… not a bean,” I mumbled stickily. “Perhaps I should be widening the time frame. I’ll try another thirty years.”

  “Worth a try.”

  The door opened behind us.

  “Judy, there’s someone at the front desk for you – said you were expecting them?”

  “Yes, right love, I’d forgotten. You OK here?” she said to me, already standing. “Be back in two ticks. Biscuits in the tin by the kettle.”

  I found no record of Matthew in any of the Surgeons’ databases I searched; his name drew a blank wherever I looked. I found “Lynes” all right, some with an “i”, one or two with a “y”, but no one with his first name in Britain, and I began to think my hunch that he originated in England had been wrong all along. Which meant looking through the US databases. I groaned, but before I resigned myself to that inevitable route, I took one last long shot at the English records.

  I went back in fifty-year chunks, typing in key words and scouring the records for each period from 1850 backwards for 200 years, covering the region from Cambridge through Rutland to Stamford. Again, nothing.

  I pushed away from the desk abruptly, and leaned back in the chair, rocking on
the back legs, my cross between my lips as I wrestled with the problem facing me.

  I knew that a Lynes family had lived in the region in the early seventeenth century – that had been confirmed by the reference to the name in the journal, and had jogged my memory when I first met Matthew. I knew that they held land there, and that one of them had been Nathaniel Richardson’s master. But as Matthew had pointed out so evasively when I mentioned it to him, Lynes was not such an unusual name, and the chance that it might be the same family was remote beyond the realms of reasonableness. But then, there was nothing reasonable about my suppositions, so why let a little thing such as being 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.

  “Blast 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.

  “Of 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 at that 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.

  “Sorry to have been so long. Any luck?”

  I folded the page and put it in my bag.

  “I 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.

  “Not 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.

  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 the shops began to shut. Christmas lights hung in abeyance across the street, waiting like a widow to shed the garb of mourning and be clothed once more in light. I had a lead on the name and the place; now all I could do was follow its thread, and hope that where it led, I wanted to follow.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The Box

  Man is no starr, but a quick coal

  Of mortall fire.

  GEORGE HERBERT (1593–1633)

  I needed to concentrate fully if I hoped to make any inroads on the negligible information I had tracked down. As I entered the broad hallway, the signature tune of the early evening news blasted from the television in the sitting room, the house otherwise quiet and at peace with itself. I started for the stairs, then changed my mind, doubling back to make my presence known to my parents and to forestall any questions.

  They looked up as I came in, my mother’s hands still twitching the wool around the fine knitting needles as she smiled at me, working all the time, the air around her strangely bright as if she were back-lit like an exhibit in a gallery. I made a mental note to have my eyes checked. Our fat tabby cat waddled over to greet me, head-butting my leg in the eternal quest for food and attention. I had barely seen him since coming home; I bent down to stroke him.

  “Hello, Tiberius – how’s things?” I scratched behind his ear just the way he liked. “Hi, Mum, Dad.”

  Click, clickity-click, Mum’s needles went without pausing.

  “Hello, darling, how did that go?”

  “Yep, Beth’s fine, so are the children, and Rob said to say ‘Hello’. Oh, and I forgot the croissants – sorry, Dad. I’ve left the money in the hall.”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, and I heard him grunt behind my back; I imagined a dark cloud with incipient rain hanging over him. Mum’s voice followed me into the dining room through the door.

  “Have you eaten? Your father’s made a wonderful casserole for this evening.”

  “I’ve had coffee, thanks, and I’m going to grab something to eat now, so don’t worry about supper for me – I’ve too much work to do.”

  “You don’t drink coffee, darling, and there’s tea in the pot,” Mum called after me.

  I raided the stone-lined pantry set into the thickness of the wall, the temperature only a degree or two above the cold night air outside. A slab of Lincolnshire pork pie, an orange, and a handful of grapes balanced on a tea plate would have to do for now, as neither hand would support any more weight. I grabbed a half-mug of tea and collected my bag on the way back through the hall. Tiberius followed, trotting upstairs beside me.

  The old tailor’s box had once held a man’s dress shirt, back when gentlemen still expected to wear stiff wing collars and to never venture forth without gloves and a hat. Now the shabby box I retrieved from the top of the cupboard squeezed in beside the fireplace contained the tatty remains of the papers my grandfather had specifically left to me in his will.

  I sat cross-legged on my bed and removed the lid, the tired cardboard smelling faintly of his cigar smoke and mothballs. Tiberius jumped up beside me, his long tail flicking in my face; I tickled his ears and he settled in a heap, half hanging off my lap, and began to purr. In lifting off the translucent layer of tissue paper that protected the contents, my heart suddenly scuttled unevenly. I breathed slowly, easing out the anxious niggle, and it settled once again to its regular beat. Here, in this old box, had lain the portion of Ebenezer Howard’s unfinished transcriptions of the journal, along with the other papers Grandpa had picked up in the auction, and his notebook cont
aining his research. I remembered him writing in the fat, foolscap book, its red cloth spine and marbled covers stained with ink. I had an image of him sitting at his desk in his bedroom by the window in the sun, a silver bowl with large, foil-covered penny toffees by his elbow, and a copper ashtray the colour of my hair. An inevitable cigar smouldered, the acrid fragrance spiralling into the rays of morning light. The toffees were his way of cutting back on the last of his vices. When very young and not too heavy, I crawled onto his knees and he would unwrap the gold discs for me which, crammed into my mouth, would keep me quiet as he told me the stories of our past, his bristly chin grazing the top of my head, my ear against the slow beat of his dying heart. When I became sleepy and had stopped listening, my grandfather would continue writing in his book, the movements his arm made as it crossed the page a soothing rocking that lulled me to sleep.

  Tiberius stretched out a paw and padded my arm. I looked down at him and he gazed back with his enormous green eyes as I stroked his warm head. The central heating struggled to heat the top floor and, tonight, frost would line the roof tiles and attempt to seep through the fragile frames of the windows. I tried to remember where I had last seen a fan-heater in the house.

  Nanna and Grandpa shared the room opposite mine in the years before he died. It faced east over the many pitched gables and slates of the old roofs behind our tall house, and the early morning sun would ripen the colours of the faded wallpaper in the summer. It smelled of my grandmother – the clean talc-and-medicine smell that seems to accompany old age. The room was as she had left it when she had been taken ill; I felt at once comforted by her presence but also an intruder in what had been her world. I retrieved the fan-heater from under her bed and retreated to my room, wrapping my blue rug around my shoulders, as much for the memory it brought me as for the warmth it would offer, and started to organize my thoughts.

  Grandpa’s familiar thin, spidery writing in dark-blue ink scored each page in meticulous formations, dates in red and place names in capital letters underscored once for a parish and twice for a town. It was a system I still used. As part of my own research I had read Grandpa’s notes, of course, but they represented nothing more than background information and a short-cut into the world of the seventeenth century. Now that I added purpose to my labours, each word held the potential to transform the mundane into a revelation.