Chapter Fourteen

D espite telling Jack she’d rather be exploring the woods, Mara has spent an hour of the sunny morning exploring the Barnley parish register in the local church. Sadly, no record of Aaron Appleby. Not a waste though. From an entry in the register, the journal, and the letter inside, Mara is sure now that Hester was Ellen’s mother.

On her walk home from the squat square-towered church at the bottom of the hill, Mara replenishes her groceries and buys two bottles of wine. She makes herself a ham and tomato sandwich for lunch and tosses about the possibility, gleaned from her discoveries, that her grandmother Ellen and baby Kathryn might have shared a house in Barnley with Hester. At least until the adventure-seeking Kathryn took herself off to London town seeking her fortune like Dick Whittington of old. A few years before the second world war.

The first entry she had come across was Ellen’s marriage to Thomas Goode in 1912. She is Ellen Williams, as she is in Aaron’s journal, spinster of Barnley. Thomas is a clerk, from Shiphaven. Mara knows her grandfather died in the first world war leaving behind his widow and a little girl, Kathryn. Too short a time Ellen and Thomas had together. She never remarried. The devastating war allowed death to reap a generation of marriageable men, and there weren’t sufficient for the unmarried women afterwards let alone those who had been wedded once. There was Kathryn, too. Men who could be choosy may well have faltered at taking on another man’s daughter.

Perhaps the lack of men had something to do with there being no marriage entry for any other Williams or Appleby girl, the nameless sister. Or she may have not been living at home by then.

Mara eats her sandwich at the kitchen table and wonders if Ellen and Thomas were so deeply in love she never wanted another man. The romantic in her adores this version. Kathryn would have known. If Mara had asked her.

The next entry had goosebumps tickling her spine and led to the sharing of the house idea. Kathryn’s birth in November 1914.

‘Found you, Mum,’ Mara had murmured with a lift of her eyes to the church ceiling.

At first, Mara thought it odd Ellen and Thomas chose to live in Barnley when his work was in Shiphaven. Until she realised poor Thomas was likely already at the front and Ellen must have been living with Hester in Barnley. Cheaper and happier to go home to mum when your husband is at war. Especially if you’re pregnant.

Mara takes her empty plate to the sink and imagines Hester, Ellen and baby Kathryn at a kitchen table in a cottage not unlike Lavender Cottage. She closes her eyes and senses their grief when the telegram comes telling Ellen she is a widow, and the baby fatherless. Was Aaron Appleby on hand to soothe their sadness? And in what capacity?

Being brought up by her mother and grandmother hadn’t held Kathyrn back. Mara boils the kettle and hears her mother describing her decision to leave her Forest home.

‘I was lucky,’ she told Mara. ‘There were still girls who were sent to London, or Cheltenham or another big city, to work as domestic servants. Most of them were terribly young.’ She had gazed past Mara’s shoulder and sighed. ‘Worked out fine for the majority, and tragic for the rest.’

‘Why did you go?’ Mara had asked.

‘Mother made sure I had a proper education.’ She frowned. ‘I believe she inherited a bit of money, no idea from where, and could afford the local grammar’s fees.’ The frown disappeared into a chuckle. ‘Armed with typing, shorthand and naivety, I trundled off to the big city as soon as I could find myself a job there.’

‘Which is where you met Dad,’ Mara said, and Kathryn had placed a hand over Mara’s, her eyes happy.

There were two other entries of note. The first was the death of Hester Appleby in 1947, the surname confirming that Hester was Aaron’s wife. Yet Ellen was Ellen Williams. Was Aaron her father, or not?

Mara sets the kettle to boil for coffee and sits at the kitchen table while she waits. She opens her notepad, scanning her scarce findings. The thing about the surname niggles at her. Then there are the June 1897 letters which someone, it had to be Hester, tucked away inside the journals, suggesting they were significant. And, finally, the abrupt end to the entries in those journals a month beforehand.

Had Aaron Appleby disappeared from Hester and Ellen’s – and the other little girl’s – lives? And was the clue to what happened to him in the letters?

Mara closes the notepad. She’s getting far ahead of herself. Maybe the poor man simply died. If so, there will be more to learn from the earlier registers, for the one held here in Barnley starts in 1899.

‘Should have mentioned it when you were on the phone.’ The helpful vicar had gently slapped his beefy hand to his forehead and explained the older registers were in Gloucester at the Records Office.

The last entry Mara found in the current register brought its own bittersweet memories, of her mother in the hallway of their home holding a stiff, business-like letter in a trembling hand. Mara was fourteen. She knows this because the letter, from a solicitor, contained news of Kathryn’s mother’s passing, and in the parish register the date of Ellen’s death is 1962.

Kathryn had wept silently, hugged Mara and whispered she should have taken her to England to meet her grandmother. She had been waiting for Mara to be old enough to understand. When pressed about understanding what, Kathryn had sighed, murmured it no longer mattered, and what Mara needed to remember was she came from a long line of strong, talented women who did what they needed to, whatever the circumstances.

The day has warmed sufficiently for Mara to carry her coffee into the garden, heading for the table under the oak resting in unmown grass. Dandelions and small white daisies brighten the greenery. As she approaches, a feeling stirs, a sense of familiarity.

Placing the mug on the wooden table, Mara takes in the scene. The familiarity is from the drawing in Aaron Appleby’s journal. She chides herself. There must be a million wooden tables under oak trees in this country. Such an English thing, and the place to be on a warm spring afternoon. While she drinks, Mara’s eyes wander across the grass to the vegetable beds and the scattering of flowers, and down the slope to the stream. The water’s soft burbling mixes with the chirruping of birds to add to her relaxed wellbeing.

Jack had pointed out a path along the stream which led to the Severn River. The idea is enticing, and Mara determines to explore this afternoon, once she has set up an appointment at the Records Office. A stroll by a babbling brook can be her reward for her day’s work.

Mara finishes her coffee and sits under the oak listening to the birdsong. Eventually, the shade’s cool edge persuades her to move, and she takes the mug inside and rinses it before thumbing through the local telephone directory. Her call is met by a recorded message telling her the Records Office is currently closed and will re-open at ten o’clock next morning. Time for her promised walk.

After changing her moccasins for walking shoes, Mara takes a bottle of water from the fridge, for she has no idea how far she is from the river. Thus prepared, she locks the door, tucks the key into the pocket of her jacket and wends her way around the flower beds to the stream.

The path is shaded by a large willow, the roots of which paddle in the water like the knobbly legs of a clutch of elderly giants. The willow’s long fronds trail in the flow, tugged towards the river. Mara pauses, frowns, shakes her head to loosen a memory, shrugs and ambles along.

Lavender Cottage is one of the last in the lane before the village gives way to fields, and Mara passes by the gardens of a handful of homes before her way is bordered by trees and long grasses on one side and the stream on the other. There’s an apple orchard, a mass of pink and white blossom, the fragrance nurtured by the warmth of the day.

She is aware of a heavy stillness which thickens as she walks further, and then she is out of the trees and ahead of her is the silver breadth of the river. The tide is ebbing, and Mara balances on the edge of a cleft where waters swirl in their eagerness to rejoin the sea. The screeching of gulls and the gurgle of the eddying water are the only sounds.

Mara gazes across the empty river, listening … Once, not too long ago, laden boats taking advantage of the outgoing tide would have filled this scene, the shouts of sailors competing with the gulls. Today there is nothing bar a dark smudge on the glittering surface which floats with the swift current. Broken branches of a tree? Mara squints.

There is light and darkness, the shape is softer edged than a tree. Long brown leafless twigs which resemble thick, ropey hanks of hair trail in a wayward current which pushes the mass towards the bank. The breeze strengthens, cools. Clouds gather, roiling white cotton balls with underbellies of grey. They elbow aside the sun, and the river’s silver coat tarnishes in the sudden shade.

Mara shivers. She stares at the mass, intuitively connecting it with the abruptness of the change from warmth to coolness, from light to gloom. The mass writhes, separates into smudged shapes, melds. Mara blinks. Sinuous arms, luminous in the gloom, reach for her.

Heart thumping, Mara recoils from the cleft where the waters spill from the bank to eddy around the … whatever this is floating against the tide.

The water-nymphs, that in the bottom played,

Held up their pearled wrists, and took her in …

The lines curl in Mara’s mind and she recognises them from Milton, a poem she read when researching the river and came across the legend of the Romans naming it Sabrina.

A siren call sings on the rising wind: Join us, swim with us…

Mara’s pulse races. She is part terrified and part desperate to wade into the churning water to obey the keening command. She wants to run, she craves to stay …

The mass – the nymphs? – rotates in the water as if a new current tugs it – them – away from the bank, away from Mara. She takes a step forward, unwilling for the nymphs – if they are nymphs – to leave her. The tide gathers them up, carries the arms, the matted hanks of hair, downstream to the channel and the sea.

The breeze blows the clouds to the far horizon, and, task complete, follows them. The sun polishes the running river to its former silver. The gulls shriek, and there is no other sound than the gulls and the last gurgling of the water from the cleft.

Mara doesn’t move for a long time, arms crossed across her trembling body

Sabrina. Goddess. The Milton poem tells about Romans and slaves and Celtic kings and queens, and an innocent young girl thrown into the waters to drown, saved by the river nymphs.

Kathryn’s words, murmured that hot day in the hospital in far distant Victor Harbour, weave a continuous loop in Mara’s head.

The river’s waiting. Been patient so long, the goddess.