An Echo in Time

Chapter 10 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POND

Chapter 10

T HE O THER S IDE OF THE P OND

The Monday-morning fog hasn’t even burned off when Charli climbs into a black cab at Paddington Station in London. She slept only a few hours on the overnight flight but has two cups of coffee running through her. Settling into the back seat, she tells the driver the name of her hotel. He knows exactly where it is, explains that cabbies in London are required to know the city backward and forward before they can get behind the wheel.

She picked Notting Hill for no other reason than she adored the Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts film. Even if that kind of love doesn’t exist in real life, it’s nice to see it on the screen. Her take on relationships is more squarely planted in the camp of how it exists on The Bachelor and Bachelorette . Even if they find their soulmate, and that’s after testing the prowess of several contestants in the fantasy suites, they almost always find their way to a messy divorce sometime after the show. Just like her parents’ experience, love is a honeymoon and a sinking ship, all aboard one long tragic cruise. Is it any surprise she likes to get off one port before the sinking?

As she takes in the sights, she recalls the last time she’d visited London—a father-daughter trip ten years earlier. They caught a couple of West End shows and visited the National Gallery to see works by some of the greats. She’ll never forget first setting her eyes on the Paul Delaroche painting called The Execution of Lady Jane Grey . She was mesmerized by it, heartbroken, torn to pieces, and yet she couldn’t not look at it. All that darkness. Of course it was her favorite painting. She still remembers the story of a teenage Lady Jane, who was queen for only nine days in 1553 before an executioner chopped off her head. But all the way to the end, Lady Jane holds a look of resolve, as if she knows something they don’t. Perhaps that touches back to Charli’s view of faith. Perhaps she doesn’t have faith, but she wants to have faith, which is maybe the first step. She wants to believe that she’s not the waste of flesh that she feels like now. She wants to have faith in the idea that maybe she does matter, that she’s somehow part of the grand design out there in the cosmos.

But for right now, she is the metal scraps of an old satellite stuck in a far-off orbit from which she will never escape.

It’s not only Lady Jane’s resolve that stuck with Charli since she was last here. It was also the way the painted woman looked so comfortable in the darkness. Charli can relate. Perhaps that’s why she’s attracted to mysteries. She’s utterly unbothered by even the most gruesome of scenes. She recalls Herman, the angry man in the constellation, or Letícia, the Brazilian woman, falling to the floor. Charli would not be surprised if what she learned in Costa Rica is true, that murderous DNA swims in her blood.

It could explain a lot, like her bleak view of the world and the guilt she often feels. She’s cut from the cloth of a killer, so what could anyone expect?

Nevertheless, the fate of her family is in her hands. What’s worse is that this holistic mission to right an imbalance in her family isn’t a science-based methodology. She’s having to rely on her faith that there’s something out there more powerful and possible than what she currently knows, and she’s been pretty short on faith for the majority of her life.

Walking into the lobby, Charli guesses her boutique hotel has about forty rooms. The smell of sausage and eggs and pastries wafts over from the restaurant where guests are having breakfast. A porter takes her bag and leads her to the front desk, where a woman in a turban gifts her an early check-in.

By booking through the hotel directly, Charli landed a decent rate with an open-ended reservation, as she’s not sure she needs to stay all the way to Sunday, which was only a guess. For that reason, she’d coughed up the extra hundred for a changeable flight too. Not that she’ll stay longer, but maybe she’ll go home earlier to save money.

Her room on the fourth floor looks out over a busy street. She’s directly across from a Chinese take-out place. When she cracks the window, she instantly smells sweet-and-sour chicken and gasoline. She takes a hurried ten minutes to unpack and make herself presentable before rushing out the door to get started.

The London Metropolitan Archives is located in the parish of Clerkenwell and housed in a dull brick building with windows that look like they’d come right out of an American high school in the eighties. Yet the magic of this place shows like the tip of a bookmark poking out of a page, and she becomes eager to pin down the truth of Samuel’s life.

The LMA has just opened, and she files in with the other early birds to begin her research. There’s so much red in there: the red chairs that push up to the desks with computers, the red shelves that line the walls. She finds the red information desk and waits in line.

A few moments later, a woman younger than Charli—perhaps midtwenties—invites her to sit. Charli feels like she’s applying for a driver’s license.

“Welcome, my name is Anna. How may I help you?” She’s likely new to the job, has this youthful vigor to her, like a starter plant that hasn’t been transferred from the greenhouse to the garden yet. Thankfully she’s not wearing red.

“I’m visiting from Boston to find out more about my family, specifically a grandfather on my mother’s side. I think his name is Samuel Hall, at least that’s what my family has always called him. I found records of his immigration to the US from London, landing at Castle Garden in 1881. The trail kind of stops, though. It looks like he came over without his parents, but I can’t find any records. It’s like he didn’t exist before the boat. I can’t find a middle name, which makes it even harder. My family tree on Ancestry goes back to the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds with every other line, but nothing comes up for him.”

“Oh, dear ... well, you’re in the right place.” Anna speaks with so much enthusiasm that she might as well show all her teeth and give a thumbs-up. Charli almost feels bad that this woman has met her match: a jaded near-thirties pessimist who has seen too much to smile like that.

Charli doesn’t even pretend to match the energy. “I tried to get some help over email and the phone and wasn’t able.”

“Yes, we’re quite busy. But let’s see what we can do for you.”

“And I have this.” Charli opens her backpack and extracts the photos of Samuel. They’re in sleeves of plastic for protection.

Anna eyes them. “Oh, he’s a handsome one, isn’t he?”

“He is.” Looks might be the only good trait passed down through the man, but she doesn’t say that. “I can’t tell if that was taken before or after he came over. I’m pretty sure that’s a beech tree, which grows here and there. But he was on a ship out of Southampton on September 16, 1881. The manifest said he was eighteen.”

Anna scrutinizes the photo as if her entire life depends on finding this man. “It does look a bit like the English countryside, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not familiar enough to know,” Charli says. “But you can obviously see that he didn’t marry the woman in the photo. The other one is him with his wife and their kids.”

Anna stares back and forth between the two photos with a frown. “Someone was heartbroken, I can guarantee that. What a cutie.”

Charli lights up. “That’s what I thought. If you flip the one of the younger couple over, you’ll see another clue.”

The woman does and says aloud, “For Miles. Who’s Miles?”

“Exactly what I’m wondering. Maybe a nickname? Or the photo was a gift to someone named Miles? Or maybe it means something like, ‘I love you for miles and miles’?”

The woman shrugs. “Don’t know that that’s a very British saying.”

“Right,” Charli says. “That’s what I was thinking. But I know him as Samuel Hall.”

One of Anna’s eyebrows rises. “Intriguing, isn’t it? Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen a name change. Family history is so much like playing telephone. A misheard word here, a misspelling there.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Do you think we could find some other records of him? I can show you what I have from Ancestry, but I’m not sure it will help. The trail goes cold afterward. Maybe his original birth records will show his parents. The only reason I know he’s from London is that it said it on the manifest. That’s where I want to start. And to see if he had any siblings. Just seems so weird to me that every other branch of my tree was easier to figure out.”

“Indeed,” she says, staring at the younger Samuel. “Don’t you wish he could speak from here? He looks like he has so much to say.”

“That would make it easier.”

Anna hums a brief but jolly melody. “I’ve seen miracles happen in this building. It takes some work, you know? Do you have a few days?”

“Just a few, yes,” she says quickly. “I fly out Sunday.”

“And I’m sure you’ve tried what we have online. Did you search the BNA files, the British Newspaper Archives?”

“I have. I’ve done everything I could from Boston, and nothing is turning up. Well, I have found lots of Samuel Halls, but nothing that I can pin down to my family.”

“You don’t have a lot to go on, do you? A name that’s possibly not accurate, paired with two photos. Not even a middle name.”

As Anna states the obvious, Charli’s hope sinks. She flew all the way here for what? For fish and chips? There’s a good chance she’ll be going home without a shred more evidence. “I know the likelihood of finding anything is slim, but I have to try.”

“I wouldn’t give up yet. If you have the persistence, you might get lucky. How about I get you started, and my staff and I will be available to help along the way. Come with me.”

Charli follows Anna toward the red desks with computers. “Samuel Hall is quite a common name,” Anna says over her shoulder. “Miles Hall, perhaps not so much. What I might suggest is the process of elimination. Let’s knock out the easy avenues first. On one of these computers here, you can access the census records. We’ve uploaded everything since 1841. Let’s assume that the age on the manifest is somewhat accurate. You’ll be able to search by potential birth years. And print out a list of any matches.”

“How could I possibly narrow it down from there? Let’s say I have fifty Samuel Halls.”

“I don’t know that you’ll have fifty. See what you come up with. Then we can take those names to search further. I can show you how to use the microfiche machine to search through both the civil and parish records. There can be a great deal of overlap, but you never know. I’ve seen someone almost give up when they found a baptism noted in the parish records for a child whose birth wasn’t even recorded in the civils. Can you believe that?”

Charli pretends she’s floored with a face more stretched than her mother’s. “This could take the rest of my life.”

“You’d be surprised what you can come up with in a few days of looking. We also have quite a few hospital records and wills that I can lead you to as well. What we want to do is get a full list and start eliminating. Who died before they were eighteen? Who died here in England? Who has their family trees populated all the way down?”

Charli sits down at one of the computers. “And what if I don’t have his name right?”

Anna blinks. “Oh dear. Then you’re trying to find someone with a photograph. That becomes much harder. You might have to dig deeper in your family. See what else they might have. Perhaps a long-lost uncle who remembers hearing something. I think you’re in the right place to get started, that’s for sure. I’ll be here if you need me. Don’t forget to drink water and eat on occasion. I’ve seen folks forget both for days on end.”

“Noted.” Charli pulls out her notebook and pictures and sets them out in front of her. She writes down Search Miles and Samuel Hall, possible birth dates from 1855 to 1865, keeping the dates broad so as not to miss something. Consider other name variations. Start with census records, then civil and parish records via microfiche. (Should have paid attention during high school library visits, as I have no idea how to read microfiche.)

That out of the way, she takes a moment to center herself by looking at her mysterious third great-grandfather. “Show yourself,” she says. “Wherever you are.”

Trying not to consider her odds, she starts tapping at the keys. The database returns twenty-two possible Samuel Halls, which is promising. Each entry shows the full name, date of birth, and the borough in London. Maybe Samuel did have a middle name, but it wasn’t recorded. An idea strikes. Could someone further down the family tree have been named after him?

Opening up her own computer, she pulls up Ancestry.com and studies the names of his children and their children, all the way down to Georgina. Then she scrolls through the list, hoping for a match.

“She’s right about that,” a voice says from a few desks down.

A man of generous proportions sits back and waits for her to respond. His belly protrudes out of a thick blue cardigan. His red cheeks and youthful smile make him look disarming enough that Charli is at least cordial as she returns a smile.

“What was that?” she asks.

“Drink your water. What Anna said. I sometimes forget.”

“Oh, yeah. I can imagine.” Charli twists back toward her work, thinking there’s no time for chitchat.

As she clicks on the next Samuel Hall, he asks, “Just getting started, are you?”

Charli once again pulls away from the computer and says politely, “Yes.”

“You sound American?”

“Yes,” she says, allowing more annoyance to slip into her tone than she intends.

He gets the message. “Well, welcome. Let me know if I can help.”

This time she puts a little extra effort into offering thanks and then goes back to work. Her search for a middle name she might recognize proves fruitless for both Samuel and Miles, the latter of which drew only three entries. Returning to Anna’s plan, Charli exports the lists and prints them out.

She walks away from the desk and goes to find Anna. It’s time to try the parish and civil records. Anna is so gracious with her time and teaches Charli how to work her way through the file systems, which are organized by borough and year, and then analyze her findings using the microfiche reader. This work will be a time suck because she has to search all thirty-two boroughs and doesn’t have a way to export and print the results, which means she must transfer the information to her notebook by hand.

Once she gets the hang of it, she moves faster, but it’s still a slog. What drives her mad is that she might be searching for a false name. She tells herself not to even go there until she’s eliminated every last Samuel or Miles Hall.

With jet lag nibbling at her, Charli spends the rest of the day searching microfiche, adding new Samuel and Miles Halls, or subtracting when she can. The middle names and birth and death dates found in the civil and parish records help tremendously, and by the time the LMA is closing, she’s narrowed it down to twelve potential people.

Exhausted at the end of her long day, she collapses into the chair of a pizza spot and has a glass of wine, a salad, and a slice. She’s too tired to even pull out her computer and allows herself to take the rest of the night off. Knowing she has to stay up to settle into the new time zone, she walks through the West End, checking out all the shows playing, and then recalls that the National Gallery is right around the corner.

Walking into the museum as most people are leaving, she takes in a few pieces that call out to her. Being there among such magnificent art snaps her out of her funk and gives her some energy. Great art is like great fiction, she thinks: telling and transporting.

When she finds Delaroche’s painting, she’s floored by how big it is, how it takes up almost an entire wall. She’d forgotten that. But she hadn’t forgotten why she was so captivated. The painting depicts Lady Jane in a beautiful white gown. A white cloth has been wrapped around her eyes, no doubt to keep the others from having to see her so intimately as she faces her death. Despite her eyes being covered, her face and posture seem to show her acceptance of her fate. She’s being led toward the wooden stump where she will lay her head by the lieutenant of the tower. To her right, her ladies-in-waiting grieve. To the left, the executioner, a well-dressed man in scarlet tights, leans on the axe.

It’s a chilling painting, and Charli finds herself staring at it for a long time, staring at the axe and at the face of the executioner, a man seemingly unfazed by his mission. Some people have a darkness in them. Is it always passed down? What if she was doomed from the day she took her first breath?

The next day, Charli wakes and, while still in bed, searches for details on her twelve potential relatives online. She signs up for Ancestry.co.uk, which is England’s Ancestry version. She’s able to find the family trees of seven of them, all of which eliminate them as possibilities.

Upon opening time at the LMA, she enlists Anna’s help. “I’m down to five, but I’m clueless as to where to go from here. I can’t find any death records, which means they could have immigrated.”

All the while, Anna is nodding thoughtfully. “Okay, so you have five names, including middle names. And birth dates, I’m assuming. One could be your third great-grandfather.” Anna swings her arm across her body. “Let’s go deeper. I doubt we’ll find much luck in tax records, but we’ve a few tricks up our sleeve. Let me show you how to search the cemetery and coroner records. In the meantime, did you search your leftover names on BNA? How about Ancestry?”

“And Family Search. I even went back this morning and checked the Castle Garden manifests for any other Halls on any other boats within a few years of his arrival. Nothing. You know what I was wondering. Since he’s school age, do you have any school records? Or yearbooks?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice. I suppose you could go to every school in London and see if they can drum up the appropriate yearbooks for you. Not a bad idea, actually. Especially since your photo is the only thing we know for sure is real. Of course, you’d have to visit every public and private school in all the boroughs. Doable but challenging.”

“There have to be other options.”

“I think you might have to take it outside of these walls. You have names, middles included. You have two photos. You have their boroughs, their dates of birth.”

“And for a couple, I have baptism and christening dates.”

“Ah! Go to the churches. They might have more information, including photographs.”

Charli pinches the bridge of her nose. “This is not work for the faint of heart, is it?”

“Not at all, but all the more rewarding that way. Let’s check those cemetery and coroner reports first, just so you can eliminate any last ones.”

“Will do. Thank you, Anna.”

Two hours later, Charli’s brain is fried. She was able to eliminate one Samuel, as he was buried in Hackney in 1894, according to the cemetery records. She’s down to four but can barely see through her weary eyes.

She stands from where she’d been sitting for the last hour, stretches, and looks around. The man from the day before sits in a chair against the wall, seemingly staring off into space. He wears the same cardigan as the day before.

Feeling bad for shrugging him off yesterday, Charli walks up to him. “Hitting a roadblock?”

“You could say that.”

“Do you work here? Seems you know your way around.”

“No, though one might think so, considering how much time I spend within these walls. Now that I’ve retired, I’ve tasked myself with becoming the family researcher. Why? Is there something I could help you with?”

“No, no. I was going for a water, per Anna’s instructions, and thought I’d offer to buy you one.”

He returns a bright smile. “Oh, that’s so kind of you. And yes, I’d like that. Let me see if I have the—”

“Please, it’s on me.”

“Are you sure?” He reacts like she’s given him a fifty-dollar bill. “My name’s Monty, by the way.”

“I’m Charli.”

“Hello, Charli. What are you working on?”

“Oh, gosh. I traveled here from Boston in hopes that I might find the roots of my third great-grandfather. He’s proving to be a complete ghost.”

“I have a few ghosts in my tree as well.”

“At least you know what you’re doing. But I’m getting closer maybe. I basically came here with a possible first and last name and two pictures.”

“Did you try the facial-recognition software?”

Charli about drops to the floor. “They have that? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“No, they don’t. I apologize, that was a rather crude joke. May I see the photos? You know, sometimes there are clues.”

She takes off her backpack, takes out the photos, and hands them to him. She’s sure he can’t help, but he’s about as nice as someone can get. Not enough of that in the world.

Monty puts on his readers and stares at the older picture first. “That looks like American architecture in the background.”

“That’s right. That one was taken in the US. Then the other, I’m guessing here.”

He flips to the picture with the younger version of her third great-grandfather. “Ah, now that’s England if I’ve ever seen it. I wonder what river that could be. Down south, if I had to guess.” He points with his free hand. “I’m sure you know that’s a Winchester College tie, correct?”

“What?” Charli takes the photo back from him and looks. She stares at the tie, for the first time, really. Being in black and white, she can’t tell the colors. “How do you know? I’ve never heard of Winchester College.”

Monty rests his crossed arms on his belly. “The angle and the thickness of the lines. My neighbor a few years back was a Wykehamist, which is what they call the men of Winchester College.”

“You’re sure?” Charli’s head is spinning.

“I’d say so. Worth a look anyway.”

Charli finds his eyes. “Thank you. You have no idea how helpful this is.”

He offers a smile that’s as soothing as a cup of chamomile tea. “Glad I could help.”

“What is Winchester College anyway?” Charli asks. “Where is it?”

“It’s in Winchester, of course. A hobnobby place. Seems your Samuel was of a higher class. Sunak went there, you know.”

“You mean the prime minister?”

He unfurls his arms. “That’s the one.”

Charli fades into her thoughts. She has to go there. She’s found the clue she’s looking for, and if she wasn’t such a pessimist, she’d call her feeling exhilarating. Since she is, though, she might play it down, go with her English roots, and say she’s rather enthused .

“I wonder if they have some kind of records there,” she says.

“They have a wonderful set of archives, my dear. A museum even. It’s a stunning place, Winchester. First capital of England. One of the finest cathedrals in the UK.”

Charli thanks Monty again. “I can’t even express my gratitude.” She stops just before she admits that his warm and generous demeanor has taught her something she won’t soon forget.

“Good luck to you, Charli.”

She rushes toward Anna, the woman who originally helped her. “You won’t believe this. The tie in my third great-grandfather’s picture. The man over there says it’s from Winchester College.”

“Oh, how about that! Look at you. A little hard work pays off, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know that I did that much.” Charli’s in tears. She knows she’s onto something.

“Showing up is half the battle,” Anna says.

“I guess so.”

After getting Monty his water and giving him a big hug, Charli leaves the LMA and races back to her hotel room in Notting Hill. She calls Winchester College in a frenzy of excitement that the rather enthused part of her can’t believe exists. Anticlimactically, they’ve already closed for the day. Finding a Hildon sparkling water in the fridge, she sits in the chair in her tiny room and reads about Winchester. It’s only an hour away, which means she’s going to Winchester first thing in the morning. That’s for sure. She tries searching for Miles and Samuel coupled with “Winchester College” but comes up dry.

Eventually, she calls her dad. “You won’t believe what happened today.”

“I’m all ears.”

“The clue was the tie.”

“What?”

She goes on to tell him everything, all too aware how uncharacteristically cheerful she is. What if she could truly make a difference in their lives?