Chapter Nineteen
In a way, Martha did 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.
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 remember how they 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 to her. 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 a felo de se needed 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.
At last, after the sun had already reached its peak, Martha found the crossroads with Charlcombe Lane.
On the north side, just as the gravedigger promised, was a silver birch tree, upright and proud even in the cold afternoon wind.
The ground beneath it was covered in yellowed grass.
Martha took off her gloves and touched first the trunk of the tree, then the ground beneath it, with her bare fingers.
“My darling Lucas, I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. I’m sorry it took me so long to forgive you.”
Sinking against the tree, Martha shut her eyes and, fingers still clinging to the grass, murmured the prayers she used to say with Lucas when putting her boy to bed.
She prayed for God to look after him, even though she knew Kenneth taught that there was no place for a soul like Lucas’s in Heaven.
She prayed for Lucas to forgive her and for him to somehow, wherever he was, take strength from how much she loved him.
Loved him—and admired him for being brave, even though it had led him to disaster.
Lucas had not taken what she and Kenneth told him life offered.
He had refused to let others limit his potential.
He had followed his heart, and if the rest of the world were as brave as him, then he and Lady Imogen should have had every reason to expect happiness.
Martha knew now the freedom that came from confessing love, even when it wasn’t meant to be, and she was proud Lucas had shown the courage to be true to Lady Imogen no matter the consequences.
Opening her eyes, Martha took in the vista that was Lucas’s dominion.
The birch tree was at a curve of Lansdown Hill, which meant that all of Bath was spread below.
She could see the glimmering white buildings of Upper Town, the squares and crescents laid out as if she were examining a map, the River Avon cutting like a blue sash across a maiden’s gown.
It was a prospect worth paying for, and Lucas had it for all eternity.
“Do you forgive me, Lucas?” she asked aloud.
In response, the wind stilled and the sun, peeking out from between clouds, shone directly on her.
And suddenly she was lighter than she had been in years. She had still lost Lucas—that loss she would never forget—but Martha no longer felt his fist around her heart, dragging her down.
They had forgiven each other; they loved each other; they must both move on.
“What shall I do next?” she asked, but this time, she got no elemental response.
She supposed she could establish herself in Bath.
With Lord Preston’s money, she had enough to rent more permanent rooms. She could take the waters, as one was supposed to do in Bath, and play cards with other widows and visit Lucas every week.
Perhaps she would even meet another man to love and cherish, one who was kind like Lord Preston but appropriate like Kenneth.
She could also still go live with Georgina. She could rent a room in London. She could go to the Continent! She could go anywhere, do anything, that would not drain her one hundred pounds (now ninety-eight pounds) too quickly.
The one thing she could not do was return to Northfield Hall.
From that weight—heartbreak—she was not yet free.
Yet Martha knew that if she waited long enough, and if she designed a firm enough life for herself, one day she would be sitting on a different hill, touched by a different breeze, and discover she no longer mourned the love she might have had with Lord Preston.
Until then, she resolved to live the best life available to her.
It was as she deliberated what “best” might mean to her that she heard the thud of hoofbeats climbing Lansdown Road. She shrank against the silver birch, determined not to be moved no matter who the stranger was, and so it took her a few moments to recognize the rider quickly approaching:
Lord Martin Preston.