Page 51 of The Widower Without a Will
Caroline covered her face with her hands.For a moment, Martin thought that was the only reaction he would earn from her—and was it anger?Dismay?Sorrow?He didn’t know.
Then she said, “Papa, you have hurt me, and I have hurt you, and it has all spilled into hurting everyone.”
Martin wished he could take her in his arms.“All I ever want is to do right by you.”
“Then go tell Mrs.Bellamy you love her.Be honest—to yourself, to us, to the world.That’s all I’ve ever wanted from you.”
Be honest.Tell Martha he loved her.Confess toherall he had done.
Martin didn’t know if he had the heart for it, but, with his children embracing him, he resolved to try.
Chapter Nineteen
Inaway,Marthadid not mind that her quest extended across days.So long as she did not find Lucas’s grave, she still had a reason to venture out of the boarding house.She did most of her searching in the afternoons and evenings, though her landlady continuously admonished her for staying out after dark.“Take the wrong turn,” warned the woman, “and you’ll end up with the molls on Avon Street.”
“I hardly think anyone would pay for my wares,” Martha replied on receiving this warning the fifth day in a row, which succeeded in leaving the landlady flabbergasted but did not prevent her the following morning from advising Martha to return before three.
In fact, as her search went on, the early evenings helped Martha.She had begun in the newspaper office, searching through their archives to see if Lucas’s burial had been mentioned in the death announcements—and indeed, she found it.On April 30, 1812, a brief paragraph read:
On Saturday last, a man from Tolpuddle retired to his room and shot himself in bed.The coroner has ruled it “felo de se” and he has been buried at a crossroads near town.
But all of this, Martha had already known.She wondered if this very newspaper article had been delivered to her and Kenneth by whoever had told them the news.She couldn’t now rememberhowthey had found out.Someone had ridden to Tolpuddle from Bath—perhaps a curate sent by a sympathetic rector?Or had it been Lady Imogen’s father, who had seemed to have friends keeping an eye on his daughter while she lived?
Either way, the newspaper did not answer the question of where Lucas was buried.The clerk who minded the archives helpfully introduced Martha to the two reporters who wrote the bulk of the articles, but neither of them had been with the paper in 1812, nor did they think the writer would know which crossroads were referenced.“We don’t ask for many details about that sort of thing,” the senior reporter explained, “unless the deceased is a person of import.”
Lucas, of course, had only been a person of import toher.Martha squared her shoulders.“If it were a person of import, how would you go about finding out?”
“I suppose I’d try to find one of the gravediggers.”
And so Martha set off in search of the men who might have dug Lucas’s grave.Bath had dozens of churches from which they might have been hired; after spending a day asking deacon after deacon whether they could direct her to gravediggers, she concluded she was most likely to find the men in question at the Griffin Inn on Milk Street.
A public house was no place for an old woman, but she compromised with herself by going as the sun set around four and staying only until seven or eight.The first night, she drank two pints of lager and heard the confession of a young man about how much he missed his grandmother.The second night, she had a third lager to stay in conversation with a man who dug graves for the Catholic cemetery, but he didn’t know anything about suicides and had only come to Bath three years before.At last, on a Saturday night, she stayed long enough that a crew of gravediggers came in after finishing a funeral for St.Swithin’s.The publican, who had decided she was his responsibility, introduced her.“Any of you lads digging graves back in ’12?”
Two of them had been.They were middle-aged men, one with a permanent sunburn and the other swarthy, and they looked at her with a certain weariness.“I’m trying to find where my son was buried,” she explained.The story was growing easier to tell now that she had stopped trying to pretend it wasn’t so.“He died by his own hand, and all they said was a crossroads near town.”
The sunburned man said, “We bury more of those than you might think.”
“Do you always use the same crossroads?”
He shook his head.“Was he young?”
“Twenty-two.He had eloped here with an earl’s daughter.They were happy, I think, but she died in childbirth, and that’s when he…”
“The Earl of Lygon?”asked the swarthy man.
Hope flared in her heart.“That’s right.”
“At a lodging house on Corn Street?”
“Yes, that’s where Lucas lived.”
He nodded sadly.“One of the earl’s men came to supervise us, which is why I remember it.Your Lucas is buried at the crossroads of Lansdown Road and Charlcombe Lane.On the northern side by a silver birch tree.”
Martha had always imagined Lucas’s body directly beneath the road—but of course, it would be too disruptive to traffic to turn up the dirt whenever afelo de seneeded burial.Now, she pictured a birch tree, firm but slender, too tall to cower in the wind, and she felt a surprising surge of joy.
At last, she knew where to find her child.
On Sunday, she attended the early service at the chapel near Seymour Street.Then, wearing her full mourning outfit, she walked up Lansdown Road.It was a long walk: through the Upper Town, past elegant Camden Crescent, and up the slope of the hill.She relished the ache in her legs and the burning of her lungs, for this was a pilgrimage.She paused now and then to sip water but never to look back.She would not think of what awaited her when she had finished this quest.She would only focus on Lucas, waiting for her under a silver birch.
