Drowned Lives

43

‘It really didn’t occur to you?’ said Rachel. ‘That Mary was a member of the Parker family?’

I slumped down in my chair. ‘Of course not.’

And it hadn’t at all. My image of my grandmother had been something quite different, a woman who’d made a difficult decision at some time in her life, but had done it out of love. I’d pictured Mary as someone who’d been vilified for an action we would hardly think unusual these days. Yet she’d been a Parker, of all things. It changed the whole picture.

‘It all fits though, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘It all ties in. Apart from that mention of Lindley Simpson in the manuscript from Kestrel.’

‘That may have meant nothing,’ said Rachel, ‘since we couldn’t read the rest of it. And we know Simpson is connected with Leo Parker anyway. They’re old business associates, and Simpson uses Parker as an advisor.’

I stood up and sat down again, suddenly restless and nervous. ‘What I don’t understand is — did Samuel want me to inquire into the lives of William and Josiah? Or did he want me to investigate his own death? Because there’s no doubt in my mind that he foresaw it was going to happen. He told Frank as much.’

‘But aren’t they all connected?’ said Rachel. ‘The three deaths. William, Josiah, Samuel. What if there’s a link? By answering one mystery, you could be answering them all. Josiah was William’s grandson. Samuel was Josiah’s grandson.’

‘Okay, so there’s a pattern.’

‘And you...’

‘Me? You can’t include me. I’m not Samuel’s grandson.’

‘Oh? Think again, Chris. It seems to me you’re the grandson he never had.’

Her words stumped me. Samuel had produced no son, despite his crazy delusion about Alison being pregnant when she died. Caroline might be expected to produce children one day — presumably by the loathsome Monks. But they wouldn’t be Buckleys, and they’d be far too late for Samuel anyway. But it was irrelevant. The question was, what had Mary been up to? That was what Samuel had asked. It was the question that had tormented him most. Why did she do what she did?

‘It should have occurred to me, shouldn’t it? That Mary was a Parker, I mean. Everything that’s happened to the Buckleys has happened through them. What she did — was it all part of the damn feud?’

Rachel had no answer. I paced across the room, my mind turning, looking for things to distract me. I paused at the carriage clock, opened its glass front and moved the hands carefully to a position that matched the time on my watch. Then I closed it again and brushed some dust off the top with my hand. Rachel watched me as I moved on to the fish tank. I bent to stare in at the fish, counting them as they went by — one fewer now since the neon tetra had died. A small tub of food stood by the tank, and I tapped some of it onto the surface of the water, watching the fish rise to intercept it. I counted them again as they gathered.

As I returned to my chair and sank into it, Rachel was laughing at me.

‘Chris, you’re just like your father. Arthur always did that with the clock and the fish.’

I thumped the arm of the chair so hard with my fist that the coffee table jumped an inch off the carpet and coffee spilled over the edge of a cup.

‘I am NOT like my father!’

Rachel recoiled, staring at me in bewilderment and embarrassment. She’d never seen me lose my temper before, and I knew it wasn’t a pretty sight. I breathed deeply, trying to control the rage that had swamped my mind from nowhere, and attempting to relax the trembling in my arms.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she said quietly.

‘Just don’t say any more, please.’

After a moment I was able to reach out to pick up my coffee, not daring to meet her eyes. The bottom of the cup was wet where it had spilled, and I rubbed ineffectually at a splash on my trousers until the uncomfortable silence had gone on too long. In another minute, it would be too late to repair the damage my outburst had done.

‘I’m sorry, Rachel. I shouldn’t have shouted at you.’

‘I didn’t realise you were so sensitive about it.’

She tried to laugh it off, though she didn’t look convincing. ‘It’s everybody’s nightmare, isn’t it? That they’ll end up just like their father or their mother. At my age, I look in the mirror every morning for signs of it, don’t you?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

But I did. I’d seen my father only this morning, staring back at me from the bathroom cabinet with the frightened, angry eyes of a person who was being driven inexorably to violence. They were the eyes of a man who’d terrorised me throughout my childhood, the father I’d been forced to face up to when I came home from Stafford.

When I returned to Lichfield, it was to a place only half recalled. By the early 1970s the population of the city had doubled with the creation of the first overspill housing estates for the conurbations of the West Midlands. By the 1990s, it had trebled. Yet the existence of these estates had somehow escaped my awareness in the claustrophobic atmosphere of my youth in Stowe Pool Lane. My landscape had been dominated by the cathedral, the Minster and Stowe pools and the seventy-eight acres of Beacon Park, with the shops of the city centre a few yards away.

So the things I’d previously taken for granted as part of normal life had begun to seem strange and unreal. Only then did I fully realise the determination of the city to hang on to its past. History lived and breathed in the streets. There were the endless performances of ancient customs, from the Greenhill Bower procession and the Sheriff’s Ride to the Court of Arraye and the View of Frankpledge, whose very names seemed to be relics of the past preserved like insects in aspic.

Medieval buildings alternated with Georgian facades in a determined rearguard action against the encroachment of McDonald’s and Superdrug. The market square where Edward Wightman became the last man in England to be burned at the stake was a few strides from WH Smith’s and Allsports. In the Cathedral Close, the sounds of a choir seeped from oak doorways and the remains of fortifications still stood where they’d been left at the end of the Civil War. If the past was another country, you’d need a passport to enter Lichfield.

In my parents’ house on Stowe Pool Lane, yet another part of the past had been preserved. Here, the air was redolent of the 1950s and early 60s. It almost came as a surprise to see a colour television in the corner of the sitting room, to glimpse the occasional CD among the vinyl Frank Sinatra records stacked by the stereo. The trouble was, this was my past. It was where I’d been brought up, where I’d spent the years when my beliefs and attitudes had been formed, for better or worse. The years when I learned what nightmares were, and I’d come to fear my father.

In my heart, I was afraid of relationships because I was afraid of becoming like him. Rachel might see the unconscious similarities in the things I did. But consciously, I’d tried to be as unlike him as I could. My father used to take me to see Wolves play. Now I supported Aston Villa. I’d moved away from my home city, only to be drawn back again. Instead of a safe, boring job, I’d opted for a high-risk venture that had failed. I’d never married, and now I was learning what loneliness was. I preferred not to think of the past, of school, of my old schoolfriends. I even avoided the pop music from my teenage years because of its unpleasant associations. I’d tried to live in the present and look only to the future.

Now Great-Uncle Samuel had taught me a hard lesson. You can ignore other people’s pasts, if you want to. But you can’t turn your back on your own.

I came back to the present to find that Rachel had moved closer and was perched on the arm of my chair with an expression of concern. She touched my hand, and for once I didn’t feel inclined to pull away. A shiver of dread had run through my body when my thoughts touched on those childhood memories. There are times when contact with another human being is vital, whoever it may be.

‘What were you thinking about then?’ asked Rachel. ‘Something awful.’

‘My father,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Did you really hate him?’

‘Hate him? I was afraid of my father, yes. But I didn’t hate him. I didn’t resent him as much as I did my mother. It was my mother I expected to protect me, and she didn’t do that.’

‘Poor Chris. I wonder if your Great-Uncle Samuel realised what he was doing when he decided to make you look into your family and your past.’

‘Oh, I think he realised that all right.’

Yes, Samuel Longden had deliberately set about re-awakening what he called my ‘genetic memory’. He’d wanted me to face up to things that I thought I’d never known about, or had managed to forget. But you can’t wipe things out of your mind altogether. You can only push them deeper into the dark corners of the subconscious. Forgetfulness is only a pretence of the mind, an implicit acknowledgement of unwelcome memories.

‘But look at it positively,’ said Rachel, still clinging to my hand. ‘You’ve discovered another family now. One you never knew you had. You should talk to them. Talk to Caroline.’

‘I don’t need a family, thanks. I was always fine on my own.’

‘We’d all like to think we’re independent, but no one lives in isolation. You can’t repudiate kinship. It’s a fact of life. You’re one of them, whether you like it or not.’

‘We’re not exactly going to gather round the piano for an old-fashioned family sing-along, are we? What’s done is done, and it’s nonsense to think we can go back and make it come out any different.’

‘I’ve been wondering, though, Chris...’

‘Yes?’

‘What if the body they retrieved from the canal wasn’t William Buckley?’

‘We’ll never know for certain, if the police won’t get a DNA test.’

‘No. But that might be for the best.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, what if it wasn’t a Buckley at all,’ she said, ‘but one of William and Josiah’s enemies, a Parker? Francis maybe.’

‘No, Francis was transported to Australia. How would he end up in a canal in Staffordshire?’

‘Do we know he was transported permanently? Sometimes they were sent for a specific period, then allowed to return home.’

I hadn’t known that. It unsettled me to think that Francis Parker, the real criminal, might have been allowed back to Staffordshire after serving his sentence.

‘Well, perhaps not Francis,’ said Rachel. ‘But some other Parker. There were plenty of them, by all accounts.’

‘But why are you suggesting this? What are you trying to say?’

‘I’m just suggesting that both families might have been as bad as each other. You’ve been focused on the idea of William and Josiah being murdered, and that’s understandable. But you’ve never considered a Parker might have been murdered by a Buckley.’

‘As bad as each other?’

It was a hard thought. But I had to acknowledge that Rachel could be right again. I didn’t know what else might have happened in the feud over those two centuries, what acts of violence could have kept it alive. An eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. Some of the Buckleys might have believed in that. Perhaps I was one of them.

‘It’s academic anyway,’ I said. ‘There’s no way they could identify the body without having some idea who it was, and then obtaining a DNA sample from a living relative for comparison. And even then, the best they could hope would be a familial match.’

Although I tried to dismiss the idea, Rachel had planted a doubt in my mind. I resolved not to mention the idea of a DNA test to the police again. If they’d written it off as too old a crime, it probably was for the best.

‘Also,’ she said tentatively, ‘I’ve been wondering whether you’re missing the point about what Samuel Longden expected you to do. Are you sure he wanted you to finish the book and publish it?’

‘Of course. That’s what he said.’

‘When?’

I thought back carefully. ‘Well, he didn’t say it to me in person. He hadn’t got round to explaining properly what he wanted when he died. But he left me the manuscript and all his notes, didn’t he?’

‘From which you assumed that he wanted you to finish it off. But he didn’t actually say so.’

‘Ah, but there was the letter he left with Mr Elsworth. That was clear.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Was it? Have you still got it?’

‘Somewhere here.’

‘Find it and read it again.’

‘But, for heaven’s sake, what else could he have meant?’

‘There might be another way that you could “finish it”, other than publishing the book,’ she said.

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Well, ask yourself, finish what? You assumed he meant the book. But couldn’t he just have easily meant he wanted you to finish the feud? There would be one way to do that — to decide you weren’t going to take revenge for the wrongs you think you’ve been done, to wipe the slate clean. That would finish the feud. You could consign it to history, where it belongs. Wouldn’t that be better than prolonging it?’

I thought of all that I’d gone through over the past few weeks. From Samuel’s death to my own near-incineration on board Kestrel. It would be an immense relief to have it in my power to put an end to it all now. But could I? Was I able to turn my back on the history of my family, on Samuel himself, who seemed to be crying out for revenge? But the voices crying to me were personal, and I didn’t know how to put these thoughts into words that Rachel would understand.

‘There’s Samuel’s fifty thousand pounds,’ I blurted out, though it was really the last thing I was thinking.

‘For God’s sake, Chris,’ she said angrily. Then she subsided. ‘I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that the money’s important to you. I suppose you could talk to Samuel’s solicitor and see if there’s any possibility of interpreting the conditions of his will in such a way that the book doesn’t have to be published.’

‘I could try, I suppose.’

‘It’s worth it, isn’t it? Well, I think it is. I’d be very glad, Chris, if you could bring yourself to do it. It would be the right thing.’

‘I’ve never quite been able to figure out what the right thing is,’ I said.

She lowered her voice, almost to an intimate whisper. ‘Sometimes we have to follow our instincts.’

My hand was getting warm where Rachel held it. She was wearing a different scent today, something expensive that was teasing my senses into life.

‘Of course we can’t change the past, but we can change what happens next,’ she said seriously.

‘It’s too late.’

‘You sound so bitter.’

‘No, not bitter — realistic.’

She turned my face towards her, and her fingers burned on my cheek as she gazed fixedly into my eyes. ‘Please, Chris, please — go and talk to Caroline.’

It was ridiculous. The more I pieced together the fate of William Buckley, the deeper became the mystery around my great-uncle’s death. It was as if the two events were inextricably linked across two hundred years, tied together with an irremovable knot. They were opposite ends of a line looped over a pulley — if you pulled hard on one end to draw it towards you, the other end moved just as rapidly away. Somehow there had to be a means of grasping both ends at once and seeing what it was that I held in my hands. But was it feasible that a feud could survive for so long, to burst back to life nearly two hundred years later?

I’d thought the Buckley family tree to be diseased. But over the years, it had been slowly strangled by a parasitic growth that had grown alongside, attaching itself to the tree’s roots, winding itself through its boughs, snapping off its branches, and smothering its shoots. This parasite had drained it of life with a suffocating embrace, like two lovers locked in a suicide pact. Here and there a bough had withstood the insidious, creeping menace. But not for long.

That night, my head was filled with images of William Buckley, and the people who surrounded him, people who were no more than names to me. Seth Parker and the dishonest Francis, who’d ended up in an Australian penal colony. Sarah Buckley and the infant Edward, less than two years old when his father had vanished. What had Edward felt about William when he’d grown up?

Then there were all the others — the Nall brothers, Daniel Metcalf, Adam Henshall and the Reverend Thomas Ella. And Reuben Wheeldon, William’s friend in Cheshire, who had come as a surprise to old Godfrey, ancestor or not. A memory of Godfrey Wheeldon came to mind and made me smile.

But there was one sentence of William Buckley’s that seemed to echo in my mind still. It was a sentence whose resonances touched something deep inside me. It was no mere platitude — it seemed to have a painfully personal meaning for him. Outwardly he is all politeness, yet at every turn he seeks to thwart me. Who had it referred to? It was the question that filled my mind as I drifted off to sleep.

I didn’t know that a hundred miles to the north, in Cheshire, the staff of the Old Vicarage nursing home were talking about Godfrey Wheeldon’s latest visitor.