October skies

‘The animals will have had them. Anybody died here would have been bear or cougar food before long.’

‘Surely there’d be bones lying around, though?’

Grace shook her head. ‘Not here. Maybe go looking around hard enough, you’ll find them all together stacked neatly into a hillside nook, like hotdogs in a jar. A bear larder. Could be one just a few hundred yards from here, could be a mile away.’

She smiled coolly at Julian, ‘I reckon dumping a body up here in the mountains is just about the best way to get rid of it. Nature’s a great recycler.’

She looked down at the chest Julian was still holding. ‘You goin’ to open that up?’

Julian nodded. ‘I need to find some names. If we can identify just one or two of the people who ended up here, that’ll be enough to get me started on the research.’

Grace looked unhappily at the chest for a moment. ‘You gonna be careful with it?’

Julian offered her a reassuring smile. ‘I’ll be very gentle, Grace.’

She locked her eyebrows suspiciously, studying him for a moment before curiosity finally won her over. ‘Okay. You go ahead and do it then.’

‘All right.’ Julian smiled and then let out a deep breath. ‘Nice and gently, trust me.’

With a twist of the penknife’s blade the latch crumbled into a shower of flakes and fell away. He tried to lift the lid but it was stuck firmly to the chest. He ran the blade of his knife lightly around the edge of the lid, dislodging more flakes and small clods of earth. With another gentle twist it cracked open and, in the stillness of the moment, they heard the slightest whisper of air rushing in.

‘My God, it was actually airtight,’ whispered Julian. He looked up at her. ‘That’s very good news.’ He slowly eased the lid open, muttering to himself, ‘So, what have we got in here, then?’

It was a small chest, with very little in it, and to his immense relief, bone dry inside. He noticed a leather purse in the corner. Poking it gently, he guessed there were coins inside. He spotted a shaving brush with what he guessed were probably badger-hair bristles, a milk-glass water cup and a mirror with an ornate silver frame. Julian picked up the mirror and turned it over in his hands. There was an engraving on the back.

‘B.E. Lambert,’ read Julian in a hushed voice.

He spotted a photo frame. Turning it over, there was a fading sepia photographic portrait of a distinguished middle-aged woman, seated. Standing behind her and to one side was a young man in his early twenties, fair hair parted tidily to one side and sporting light-coloured sideburns and a modest moustache. By the likeness of their facial features, Julian guessed them to be mother and son.

Neither were smiling, both looking intently at the camera. It was a formal portrait. He noticed the young man’s hand resting gently on the woman’s shoulder; a small gesture that communicated a lot.

They were close. Or perhaps this was a farewell portrait?

Julian gently placed the frame back in the box and noticed, beneath the other things, a dark burgundy leather-bound notebook. He reached in and pulled it carefully out. Then, with a quick glance up at Grace, who nodded for him to go ahead, he opened the front cover. There was an inscription on the inside, the gently looping swirls of a woman’s hand:

Benjamin,

For all your adventures in the New World. Fill these pages with your exciting stories, and then come home safely to me.

Your loving Mother.

He grinned and looked up at Grace. ‘This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find.’

He gently flipped the first page over; fragile, yellowed by time. Overleaf a dated first entry in tidy copperplate, little more than a few hastily jotted sentences, a sketch of a quayside and, as far as he was concerned the most useful scrap of information, a bill of passage from Liverpool to New York on a ship called the Cathara.

‘Excellent.’ He laughed and looked up from the notebook. ‘That’s more than enough to find out who this bloke was, Grace. More than enough.’

He lightly turned over a few more pages, the entries growing longer and longer, dense with meticulous handwriting and a few pencil sketches. He spotted amidst the spidery pen strokes names used over and over: Preston… Keats… Sam… Emily… then the writing became too erratic, too dense and tangled and the ink towards the end too faint to easily decipher.

Watered-down ink. This guy was doing his best to stretch out an emptying inkpot.

There was a lot in this leather book, he sensed: perhaps the complete story of what had happened here. But he’d need to scan the pages and digitally clean them up to make them easily legible, particularly the latter ones.

‘Grace, with your permission, I’m going to take just this book with me, okay? Nothing else.’

She looked unhappy with that. ‘Ain’t yours to take.’