EIGHTEEN
Eighteen
Lottie closed her eyes and paused in the doorway of her little shop, taking a moment to enjoy the stream of morning sunshine warming the crispness of the approaching winter air. It was still early but outside, the main street was beginning to bustle as people finished school drop-off and tourists woke up to start exploring.
A smile broke out on her lips as she spotted the now familiar figure walking towards her, carrying a paper bag from the bakery. Lottie’s mouth watered in anticipation. Every time Damian turned up at her shop or the house, he came bearing sinful treats from the bakery, which was conveniently located along the walk from his motel.
‘Judy said to say hi,’ he said. He’d already managed to get to know almost as many people as she did.
He kissed her briefly, yet still with enough lazy passion to get her heart rate tripping over itself. ‘I found something interesting,’ he said as he pulled back, beckoning her to follow him.
Lottie turned away from the view and allowed him to lead the way into the office. It didn’t matter that they’d spent every possible moment over the past ten days together, she still couldn’t help the little bubble of excitement that tickled about inside her each time she looked at him.
‘What is it?’ Lottie asked, coming to stand next to the desk, where he put down the paper bag before extracting a yellow envelope folded lengthways from his back pocket.
‘The curator from the National Trust, who are the custodians of Asply House in Essex, sent through everything she could find relating to Catherine from their collection of diaries and letters owned by Lady Agatha Asply, who was Catherine’s closest childhood friend.’
‘Oh, wow,’ Lottie said, eager to see.
‘There were two letters in particular that had something interesting. I had them printed out,’ he said, handing her a page filled with beautifully written cursive.
Lottie concentrated hard on the words before her. It may as well have been in some foreign dialect, the terminology and the elegant, almost flamboyant, penmanship making for slow reading.
A few words did jump out at her, though—enough to make her take a seat and read the letter with more care.
‘Look at this line in particular,’ Damian said through a mouthful of vanilla slice, seemingly having no trouble deciphering the handwriting.
I shall miss you terribly, and I worry about you travelling such a long way in your delicate condition. I do wish you would have allowed me to go along as your companion.
Lottie looked up with a concerned frown. ‘Catherine was pregnant?’
‘Seems so.’
‘How long did it take to come to Australia by ship in the 1800s?’
‘About three or four months, depending on weather and the time of year.’
Lottie shook her head slightly. It never ceased to amaze her how brave women had to be back then. She couldn’t imagine sailing off into the unknown, alone and pregnant.
‘It’s pretty much confirmed by this,’ he said rifling through some more photocopies to place an excerpt of what looked like a diary page in front of her. ‘This was from Agatha’s diary, which is part of a display at the Asply estate.’
‘I don’t know how you can read their handwriting,’ she said, shaking her head with a frown.
‘Practice. You learn how to get the hang of it when you’re looking for stuff.’
‘You read it, I’ll be here all day otherwise,’ Lottie said, handing the paper back to him.
‘“I shall miss my friend, enormously, however each day I am torn as to the promise I allowed Catherine to swear me to before she left and I fear that I may be contributing to her potential danger. Understandably, her family are against her decision to move to the colonies to be with her husband, as am I. I suspect her parents in particular had hoped that distance and time would end the notion.”’
‘It seems it didn’t,’ Lottie said dryly.
‘“At the time of embarking on her hideously long journey,”’ Damian continued, ‘“Catherine took me into her confidence and shared the news that she was with child and had been hiding the fact for some four months. She feared telling her family as they would have tried to stop her from travelling, but ever headstrong, she refused to allow anything to stand in her way of reuniting with her husband. Now I wish I had told someone so as to have stopped her undertaking such a dangerous journey. She would never have forgiven me, of course, but should it have stopped a travesty, I would have gladly accepted my fate. Now, it is too late. If anything happens to her, I will hold myself completely to blame.”’
‘Is there anything that mentions Catherine going missing? Poor Agatha, she was almost predicting bad news,’ Lottie said shaking her head.
‘Agatha died of tuberculosis only two months after Catherine left on the ship. But she was a remarkable young woman. She produced a number of beautiful artworks—watercolours and sketches. There’s a couple of which I believe to be of Catherine herself.’ He took out his phone and brought up a website of Asply House, which showed a long gallery wall full of stunning artwork. He paused on one portrait and handed his phone across to her. A beautiful young woman with blonde hair was shown sitting on a picnic rug beneath a leafy tree, her head tilted back and her eyes closed as though soaking up the sunlight that was so skilfully painted as filtering down through the leaves above her and glinting on a delicate gold chain she wore around her slender throat.
Damian instructed her to continue scrolling to another portrait of the same young woman, this one more formal but with much finer detail. Her blonde hair was scooped up in an elegant chignon that nestled into the curve of her graceful, swan-like neck, and her enormous blue eyes had been painted with such intricate and realistic detail it was as though she were looking into Lottie’s very soul. Lottie noted she wore the same gold chain in this painting as well. It seemed an unusual piece of jewellery—in that it was so plain and simple for such an obviously wealthy young woman to be wearing in not one but two portraits.
‘How old was Agatha when she died?’ Lottie asked as she studied the beautiful paintings.
‘She was twenty-four.’
Lottie felt a flash of sorrow. ‘So young. What a terrible waste of a talent. So what happened to the baby? Did she make it to Australia before she was due?’
‘There’s no record of Catherine having a child,’ he said, slumping down into a chair across from her. ‘This is the first and only mention of the possibility that she was pregnant.’
‘So we don’t know for sure that she was?’
‘Not officially, but I can’t imagine Agatha would have been so concerned about her friend if it hadn’t been true. And if we consider that she was four or so months along and the trip had lasted a little longer than four months by a handful of weeks, she would have been eight months, if not slightly more, by the time she arrived.’
‘Talk about cutting it close.’
‘Of course, there’s the possibility that she may have lost the child at some point, although there was no mention of anything happening in the ship’s log. It’s not impossible that Catherine could have asked the ship’s doctor not to make any notes if she were trying to keep the pregnancy a secret, I suppose,’ he mused. ‘It’s all just a lot of guessing without any solid records, though.’
‘How do historians ever manage to piece together history if it’s so hard to find records for everything?’
‘We do a lot of digging,’ he said dryly.
Lottie gave him a wry smile. ‘So Catherine disappears and she may or may not have had a child with her at the time?’
‘Correct.’
‘And there aren’t any hospital records from back then?’
‘Not many. But back in the early days, there was what’s known as the Benevolent Asylum.’
‘As in mental asylum?’
‘Not in this case. This was originally set up to take care of the poor as well as the sick, and for women who found themselves pregnant and with nowhere else to go. It was a place of refuge.’
‘Makes sense that Catherine might have ended up there if she were close to delivery when she got here. Although you wouldn’t think that she’d need that kind of help, with a wealthy husband waiting for her.’
‘Depends on the circumstances. We have no idea what happened to her after she arrived on that ship. But there are no records of her being admitted,’ Damian said with a sigh. ‘Then again, if she’d been in some sort of situation where maybe she wasn’t able to tell anyone who she was, no one would have known.’
‘Surely that would have been the first place her husband or the police would have checked when they realised she was missing?’
‘I’d imagine so. It was a dead-end anyway, with no record of her ever admitted.’
‘From Agatha’s letters, it doesn’t seem like the theory of her returning home would be logical. She was clearly in love, and Alexander was obviously crazy about her if he went to all the trouble to build his fortune and a house like Frolesworthy for her. So whatever happened must have been something against her will. Maybe she was involved in an accident?’
‘It would seem there had to be something like that. But again, Alexander was a man of considerable wealth. He would have undoubtedly looked into any incidents of a woman killed or injured without an identity.’
‘Maybe he was only looking for a woman who wasn’t with child? What if he dismissed any Jane Does who’d been pregnant at the time? I mean, if he didn’t know she was pregnant?’
‘It’s possible,’ he agreed. ‘There’s nothing we have that suggests he knew about the baby, though that doesn’t mean he didn’t. She could have written to him and we just don’t have the record of it.’
‘How sad if he didn’t know and she did die all alone in some tragic way,’ Lottie said. The idea left her feeling completely gutted. Imagine having travelled all that way, so full of excitement for a future with her husband and child, only to die alone in a strange country, and not even be claimed.
Lottie saw Damian’s face soften. He stood, tugging her gently to her feet and held her. ‘We don’t know anything for sure.’
‘We know that she travelled all that way on a ship but never got to live in the beautiful home her husband built for her. She wasn’t on the coach; she wasn’t at his funeral. I think we both know something horrible had to have happened to her.’
‘Most likely,’ he said gently. ‘But it was a very long time ago.’
‘I know,’ she said, feeling a rush of emotion. ‘But it’s still incredibly sad.’
He gave a sympathetic chuckle and pulled her tightly against him. ‘You don’t have to listen to me rambling on if it’s too much.’
‘You’re not rambling on. I want to hear about everything you uncover. I’m invested in Catherine’s story now. I need to find out what happened to her.’
He gave her a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. ‘Then we’d better keep digging.’