‘I’m sorry?’
‘In Who Was Who the entries are all dead. Who supplies the information then?’
She shrugged. ‘Remaining family, I expect. Most of it I guess they just copy from the last questionnaire the entry provided. Add the death dates and Bob’s your uncle.’ She brushed a bit of lint from the top of the shelf. ‘We’re closing in ten minutes. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.’
There had been a mistake, that was all. It must happen often; after all, the person setting the type didn’t know the subjects personally. It was possible, wasn’t it, that a typesetter’s mind might wander for a moment, the word ‘late’ be inserted by error? A stranger consigned to early death in posterity’s silent eyes?
It was little more than a typo. She knew she was the child of whom the entry spoke and she most certainly was not ‘late’. All she needed to do was find a biography of Nathaniel Walker and she could prove the entry was wrong. She had a name now; her name had once been Ivory Walker. And if it didn’t feel familiar, if it didn’t slip over her like a well-worn coat, then that was as it was. There was no accounting for memory, which things stuck and which didn’t.
She remembered suddenly the book she’d bought on her way into the Tate, all about Nathaniel’s paintings. It was bound to include a brief biography. She pulled it from her bag and flipped it open.
Nathaniel Walker (1883–1913) was born in New York to Polish immigrant parents, Antoni and Marya Walker (originally Walczwk). His father worked on the city wharves and his mother took in laundry and raised their six children, of whom Nathaniel was the third. Two of his siblings died of various fevers and Nathaniel was set to follow his father onto the wharves when a picture he had been sketching on a New York street was noticed by passer-by Walter Irving Jnr, heir to the Irving oil fortune, who commissioned Nathaniel to paint his portrait.
Under his patron’s wing, Nathaniel became a well-known member of New York’s burgeoning society. It was at one of Irving’s parties in 1907 that Nathaniel met the Honourable Rose Mountrachet who was visiting New York from Cornwall. They were married the following year at Blackhurst, the Mountrachet estate near Tregenna, Cornwall. Nathaniel’s reputation continued to grow after his marriage and relocation to the UK, and the pinnacle of his career was the commission in early 1910 for him to paint what would be King Edward VII’s final portrait.
Nathaniel and Rose Walker had one daughter, Ivory Walker, born in 1909. His wife and daughter were Nathaniel’s frequent subjects and one of his best loved portraits is that named Mother and Child. The young couple were tragically killed in 1913 at Ais Gill when their railway train and another collided and caught fire. Ivory Walker died from scarlet fever days after her parents’ deaths.
It made no sense. Nell knew she was the child to whom this biography referred. Rose and Nathaniel Walker were her parents. She remembered Rose, had done so instantly. The dates fitted: her birth, even her voyage to Australia, tied in too neatly with Rose’s and Nathaniel’s deaths to be coincidence. Not to mention the further connection that Rose and Eliza must have been cousins.
Nell turned to the index and ran her finger down the list. She stopped at Mother and Child and flicked to the nominated page, heart thumping.
A tremor in her lower lip. She might not remember being called Ivory but there was no longer any doubt. She knew what she had looked like as a little girl. This was her. Sitting on her mother’s lap, painted by her father.
Why then did history think her dead? Who had given such misinformation to Who Was Who? Was it a deliberate deception or had they believed it themselves? Not realising that she had, instead, been boarded on a ship to Australia by a mysterious writer of fairytales.
You mustn’t speak your name. It’s a game we’re playing. That’s what the Authoress had said. Nell could hear it now, the silvery voice, like a breeze off the ocean surface. It’s our secret. You mustn’t tell. Nell was four years old again, felt the fear, the uncertainty, the excitement. Smelled the river mud, so different from the wide blue sea, heard the hungry Thames gulls, the sailors calling to one another. A pair of barrels, a dark hiding space, a thread of dust-flecked light . . .
The Authoress had taken her. She hadn’t been abandoned at all. She’d been kidnapped and her grandparents didn’t know. That’s why they hadn’t come looking for her. They’d believed her dead.
But why had the Authoress taken her? And why had she then disappeared, leaving Nell alone on the boat, alone in the world?
Her past was like a Russian doll, question inside question inside question.
And what she needed to unravel these new mysteries was a person. Someone to whom she could speak, who might have known her then, or know someone who had. Someone who could shed light on the Authoress, and the Mountrachets, and Nathaniel Walker.
That someone, she figured, was not going to be found in the dusty vaults of a reference library. She would need to go to the heart of the mystery, to Cornwall, to this village, Tregenna. To the huge dark house, Blackhurst, where once her family had lived and she, as a little girl, had roamed.
19
London, 2005
Ruby was late for dinner but Cassandra didn’t mind. The waiter had given her a table by the large glass window and she was watching harried commuters hoofing their way home. All these people, the stars of lives unfolding quite outside the sphere in which Cassandra’s own life took place. They came in waves. There was a bus stop right out front, and across the street the South Kensington tube station still wore its pretty coat of Art Nouveau tiles. Every so often the traffic current swept a wind-blown cluster of people inside the restaurant doors, where they would slide into seats or stand by the brightly lit deli awaiting white cardboard boxes of gourmet food to carry home for dinner.
Cassandra rubbed her thumb along the soft, worn edge of the notebook and ran the sentence through her mind once more, wondering whether it would sit more easily this time. Nell’s father was Nathaniel Walker. Nathaniel Walker, painter to the royals, had been Nell’s father. Cassandra’s great-grandfather.
No, the truth still fitted like someone else’s glove, just as it had when she’d first uncovered it that afternoon. She’d been sitting on the bench by the Thames decoding Nell’s scrawled account of her visit to the Battersea house in which Eliza Makepeace had been born, the Tate Gallery where Nathaniel Walker’s portraits were on display. The breeze had picked up, skimming the river’s surface and racing up the banks, and Cassandra had been about to leave when something drew her eye to the particularly scratchy passage on the facing page, an underlined sentence that read: Rose Mountrachet was my mother. I recognise her portrait, and I remember her. An arrow then, and Cassandra’s attention leapt ahead to the title of a book, Who Was Who, under which was printed a hasty list of dot-points.
• Rose Mountrachet married Nathaniel Walker, painter, 1908
• one daughter! Ivory Walker (born some time after—1909? Check scarlet fever?)
• Rose and Nathaniel both killed 1913, train crash, Ais Gill (same year I disappeared. Link?)
A piece of loose paper had been folded into the margins of the notebook, a photocopy taken from a book called Great Rail Disasters of the Steam Age. Cassandra pulled it out again now. The paper was thin and the text faded, but it was blessedly unmarked by the mould spots that were busy devouring the rest of the book. The title at the top read ‘The Ais Gill Railway Tragedy’. As bistro noise hummed warmly around her, Cassandra scanned once more through the brief but enthusiastic account.
In the dark and early hours of 2 September 1913, two Midland Railway trains left Carlisle Station en route for St Pancras Station, all those aboard unaware that they were being spirited towards a scene of utter devastation. It was a steep line, traversing as it did the peaks and troughs of the rolling northern landscape, and the trains were hopelessly underpowered. Two facts conspired to drive the trains to their destruction that night: their engines were smaller than was recommended for the li
ne’s steep gradients, and each had been supplied with poorly screened coal, full of slack that prevented it from burning efficiently.
After departing Carlisle at 1.35 am, the first train laboured to reach the Ais Gill summit: the steam pressure began to plummet and the train ground to a halt. One can imagine the passengers would have been surprised by the train’s sudden stoppage so soon after leaving the station, but not unduly alarmed. After all, they were in safe hands; the guard had reassured them that they’d only be sitting still a few minutes and then they’d be on their way again.
Indeed, the guard’s certainty that the wait would be short was one of the fatal errors made that night. Conventional railway protocol suggests that if he’d known how long it would take for the driver and fireman to clean the grate and rebuild the steam pressure, he’d have laid some detonators or carried a lantern down the line to signal to any oncoming trains. But alas, he did not, and thus the fates of the good folk on board were sealed.
For further down the line the second engine was also straining. It pulled a lighter load but the small engine and inferior coal were nonetheless sufficient impediments to cause the driver difficulties. A few miles before Mallerstang, the driver made the fatal decision to leave the cab and inspect the engine in action. Though such practice seems unsafe by today’s standards, it was quite a common occurrence those days. Unfortunately, while the driver was absent from the cab, the fireman also encountered problems: the injector was stalling and the boiler level had begun to fall. When the driver returned to the cab, the task consumed their attention so fully that they both missed the red lantern being waved from the Mallerstang signal box.
By the time they finished and returned their attention to the line, the first stalled train was but a few yards away. There was no way the second train could stop in time. As can be imagined, the damage was extreme and the tragedy yielded unexpectedly high casualties. Additional to the collision impact, the parcels van’s roof slid over the second engine and dissected the first-class sleeping accommodation behind. The gas from the lighting system ignited and fire swept through the devastated carriages, claiming the lives of those poor unfortunates who stood in its way.
Cassandra shivered as images from a dark night in 1913 assailed her: the steep summit ride, the night-draped terrain through the window, the sensation of the train coming to an unexpected standstill. She wondered what Rose and Nathaniel had been doing at the moment of impact, whether they’d been asleep in their carriage, or engaged in conversation. Whether they’d even been speaking of their daughter, Ivory, waiting for them at home. How odd that she should be so moved by the plight of forebears she’d only just learned she had. How awful it must have been for Nell, to finally discover her parents only to lose them again in such a terrible way.
The door of Carluccio’s pushed open, bringing with it a burst of cool air laced with exhaust fumes. Cassandra looked up to see Ruby bustling towards her, a thin man with a shiny bald head close behind.
‘What an afternoon!’ Ruby collapsed onto the seat across from Cassandra. ‘A group of students right at the last. I didn’t think I’d ever extricate myself!’ She indicated the thin neat man. ‘This is Grey. He’s a lot more fun than he looks.’
‘Ruby, darling, what a charming introduction.’ He extended a smooth hand across the table. ‘Graham Westerman. Ruby’s told me all about you.’
Cassandra smiled. It was an interesting proposition given that Ruby had known her the sum total of two waking hours. Still, if anyone was capable of such a miracle, Cassandra suspected it was Ruby.
He slid into a seat. ‘What a stroke of luck inheriting a house.’
‘Not to mention a delicious family mystery.’ Ruby waved at a waiter and proceeded to order breads and olives for them all.
At mention of the mystery, Cassandra’s lips tingled with her newfound knowledge, the identity of Nell’s parents. The secret, though, sat lumpen in her throat.
‘Ruby tells me you enjoyed her exhibition,’ said Grey, eyes twinkling.
‘Of course she did, she’s only human,’ said Ruby. ‘Not to mention an artist herself.’
‘Art historian.’ Cassandra blushed.
‘Dad said you draw brilliantly. You illustrated a kids’ book, didn’t you?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I used to draw, but it was just a hobby.’
‘Bit more than a hobby from what I hear. Dad said—’
‘I used to muck around with a sketchpad when I was younger. Not any more. Not for years.’
‘Hobbies have a tendency to drop by the wayside,’ Grey said diplomatically. ‘I submit as evidence Ruby’s mercifully short-lived infatuation with ballroom dancing.’
‘Oh Grey, just because you’ve got two left feet . . .’
As her tablemates fell to debating Ruby’s commitment to the finer points of salsa, Cassandra let her thoughts slip backwards to the afternoon, many years before, when Nell had tossed the sketchpad and pack of 2B pencils onto the table where Cassandra was busy drowning in algebra homework.
She’d been living with her grandmother for just over a year. Had started high school and was having as much trouble making friends as she was making equations balance.
‘I don’t know how to draw,’ she’d said, surprised and unsure. Unexpected presents had always made her wary.
‘You’ll learn,’ said Nell. ‘You’ve got eyes and a hand. Draw what you see.’
Cassandra sighed patiently. Nell was full of unusual ideas. She was nothing at all like the other kids’ mums and certainly nothing like Lesley, but she meant well and Cassandra didn’t want to hurt her feelings. ‘I think there’s more to it than that, Nell.’
‘Nonsense. It’s just a matter of making sure you see what’s really there. Not what you think is there.’
Cassandra raised her eyebrows dubiously.
‘Everything is made up of lines and shapes. It’s like a code, you just need to learn to read and interpret it.’ Nell pointed across the room. ‘That lamp over there, tell me what you see.’
‘Um . . . a lamp?’
‘Well there’s your problem,’ said Nell. ‘If all you see is a lamp, you’ve no chance of drawing it. But if you see that it’s actually a triangle on top of a rectangle, with a skinny tube connecting them—well you’re halfway there, aren’t you?’
Cassandra shrugged, uncertain.
‘Humour me. Have a go.’
Cassandra sighed again, a small sigh of extravagant tolerance.
‘Never know, you might surprise yourself.’
And she had. Not that she’d exhibited any great talent that first time. The surprise had been how much she enjoyed it. Time had seemed to disappear when she had the sketchpad on her lap and a pencil in her hand . . .
The waiter arrived and tossed two tins of bread onto the table with continental flair. Nodded as Ruby placed an order for prosecco. As he left, Ruby reached for a wedge of focaccia. She winked at Cassandra and indicated the table. ‘Try the olive and balsamic. They’re to die for.’
Cassandra dunked some focaccia into the oil and vinegar.
‘Come Cassandra,’ said Grey, ‘save an old unmarried couple from bickering, tell us about your afternoon.’
She picked up a crumb of bread that had fallen onto the table.
‘Yes, anything exciting?’ said Ruby.
Cassandra heard herself start speaking, ‘I found out who Nell’s biological parents were.’
Ruby squealed. ‘What? How? Who?’
She bit her lip, arresting its attempt to tremble into a smile of self-conscious pleasure. ‘Their names were Rose and Nathaniel Walker.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ Ruby laughed, ‘it’s the same as my painter, Grey! What are the odds of that, and us just speaking of him today, and he once living on the same estate as . . .’ She froze as realisation turned her face from pink to white. ‘You do mean my Nathaniel Walker.’ She swallowed. ‘Your great-grandfather was Nathaniel Walker?’
Cassandra nodded, couldn?
??t stop herself grinning. Felt vaguely ridiculous.
Ruby’s mouth dropped open. ‘And you had no idea? Today, when I saw you at the gallery?’
Cassandra shook her head, still smiling like a fool. She spoke, if only to force the goofy grin from her face. ‘Not until this afternoon when I read it in Nell’s notebook.’
‘I can’t believe you didn’t say something as soon as we got here tonight!’
‘With all your talk of salsa, I imagine she didn’t have the opportunity,’ said Grey. ‘Not to mention, Ruby darling, that some people actually like to keep their private life private.’
‘Oh Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren’t supposed to tell it.’ She shook her head at Cassandra. ‘You’re related to Nathaniel Walker. Some people have all the bloody luck.’
‘It feels a little strange. It’s very unexpected.’
‘Too right,’ said Ruby. ‘All those people searching through history in the hopes they’re related to Winston bloody Churchill, and provenance drops unexpectedly into your lap in the shape of a famous painter.’
Cassandra smiled again, couldn’t help it.
The waiter reappeared and poured them all a glass of prosecco.
‘To solving mysteries,’ said Ruby, holding hers aloft.
They clinked glasses and all took a sip.
‘Pardon my ignorance,’ said Grey, ‘my knowledge of art history isn’t what it might be, but if Nathaniel Walker had a daughter who went missing, surely there’d have been a huge search?’ He held his palms out towards Cassandra. ‘I’m not doubting your grandmother’s research, but how on earth did the daughter of a famous artist go missing and no one knew it?’
Ruby, for once, had no ready answer. She looked to Cassandra.
‘From what I can gather, reading Nell’s notebook, all the records say Ivory Walker died when she was four. The same age Nell was when she turned up in Australia.’
Ruby rubbed her hands together. ‘You think she was kidnapped and whoever did it made it look like she had died? How completely thrilling. So who was it? Why did they do it? What did Nell find out?’