The Cuckoo’s Child

Laura stood in the garden listening until the last sound of the motorcar’s engine had faded, her coat pulled tight around her shoulders. The wind was sharp, but she didn’t feel cold. Despite the unsatisfactory last few words with Tom, a feeling persisted that was warm and real, but at the same time elusive, and not to be damaged or lost by trying to capture it. Amongst all this sadness, was it wrong to feel the way she did?

She jumped as a figure suddenly appeared round the corner, the lanky Sergeant Rawlinson, a lit cigarette in his hand. He was equally surprised. ‘Miss Harcourt! I heard the motorcar go and didn’t realize anyone was still around. Did I give you a scare? I’m sorry.’

Laura nodded, looked around and perched herself on a roughly fashioned stone seat, a large slab of rock set on two other rocks, placed in front of the square pool. Curious as to what the sergeant might want, she waited.

He put his cigarette out and sat at the other end of the seat. Abruptly, he said, ‘It must have been shocking to find out about your parents as you have done.’

‘Sad, rather than shocking,’ she replied quietly. ‘But – forgive me if I wonder what bearing that has on your enquiries? Why are you asking?’

He sat with his arms folded across his chest, holding himself tightly in. ‘Maybe it’s not my place to talk about it. On the other hand, maybe I understand better than most. See . . .’ He stopped and then rushed on, ‘I never knew my parents, either. It would give me a nasty turn to have them thrust on me now.’

‘That’s not how I feel. I was looked after and loved by Mrs Illingworth before being handed over to my aunt and uncle. I’ve been fortunate there, too, but I’m glad I know now about my real parents.’

‘I was abandoned,’ he said tersely. ‘In a church porch. Found by the vicar. He’d no idea what to do with a baby so he went to the only person he could think of for advice. She was the village schoolmistress, Matilda Dacres, never been married, never wanted a child of her own, but she was a good Christian woman and agreed to keep me until they could find out what to do with me. I was still with her when she died, when I was eighteen.’

He shrugged. ‘She did her best, I suppose. She saw that I was well fed and clothed and made sure I was educated properly.’ He paused. ‘Yes. She never said so, but I reckon she did, in her own way.’ He slipped a hand inside his jacket pocket, took out his wallet and extracted a photo. ‘That’s her, Tilly. She insisted I call her that, her childhood name.’

Miss Dacres had been a woman with a determined chin, a firm mouth and a high-boned collar, but Laura thought she had kind eyes. ‘She looks nice.’

‘No!’ he said roughly. ‘She didn’t want me when I was a baby, why should she want me when I was grown up? In any case, everybody knew who my parents were – a pair of travellers, good-for-nowts who’d been hanging around the place for several months. Sleeping rough, or at one of the common lodging houses if they could find fourpence for a bed. My mother and the man she was with disappeared after leaving me, and there wouldn’t have been much chance of ever finding them.’

‘I’m sorry, indeed I am.’ Laura was, and for the mother, too. She had learnt a good deal in the last year at the Settlement about the heartache of women who abandoned their babies. ‘But why are you telling me this?’

‘Dunno, really. Mr Womersley would probably kick me to kingdom come if he knew.’ He stirred restlessly. ‘I was thinking about that fire, see.’ He nodded towards the black bulk of the ruined wing. ‘And then I saw you and – well, don’t rightly know why I said what I did. I apologize if I’ve upset you.’

‘Oh, please, you haven’t.’ He was a bony, edgy young man, impetuous and unwise in some things for all she knew, but this blurted out confession to her of his own circumstances had established some odd kind of rapport between them. The wariness about him she had felt in the study vanished. ‘It was kind of you.’

‘Kind? I don’t know about that. It’s just that we’re up against a bit of a block in this investigation and I can’t help feeling that something in Mr Beaumont’s past, this fire here, maybe, might have a bearing on it. I might be wrong,’ he finished lamely.

Was it a coincidence that Ben Kindersley’s manuscript, and the conflagration in which her father had perished, were both from the same time, twenty years ago, just before she had been born? There was so much she didn’t yet know about these newly found parents of hers. She needed time, to come to grips with how she thought and felt about it all, to read that file of letters between Ainsley and William Carfax. She did not see how any of it could have any bearing on the death of her grandfather, or whether it would help to tell the police about that manuscript, but in one respect she felt bound to agree with the sergeant.

‘You’re right, there’s some mystery surrounding the fire. Nobody talks of it, nobody mentions it. Nobody ever mentions my father, Theo.’

‘It was a long time ago. People have short memories.’ Or don’t remember what they want to forget, he might have added. ‘Would it be too much to ask that if you should learn anything, you might let me know?’ he asked, as they parted.

She promised she would, and when he had left, she vowed to herself that she would search again through the few remaining shelves in the library she had not yet worked upon, in case there was something more that Ben Kindersley had left, something that might give an ending to that infuriatingly incomplete story, though it seemed unlikely that there would be anything more. She would, however, remove and keep the ribbon-tied roll from where she had returned it to its original place. She felt she had a right to do that. It was her mother’s story, part of her own story, what had brought her here.