The Forgotten Children

by Anita Davison

‘I suppose so.’ Flora tried to recall if Sister Lazarus’ face was among those gathered round Lizzie Prentice in the yard, but couldn’t remember.

  ‘Stop looking for shadows, Flora.’ He slid his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, I enjoy these sojourns of yours into crime, but not everyone you meet is a villain. Accidents do happen on occasion.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’ She reached up to adjust her hat that he had dislodged. ‘Although I don’t like unanswered questions.’

  By the time the hansom had reached Westminster Bridge, she had resolved to call her friend Lydia when they got home and invite her to tea the following afternoon. One thing she was sure of, was Miss Finch’s mention of Martell’s tea room was not a coincidence.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Thank you for taking me to Elena’s for dinner last night.’ Flora planted a kiss on Bunny’s cheek as she passed him in the dining room on her way to her chair. ‘It was a lovely surprise. And you were right, it did help take my mind off what happened yesterday.’

  ‘Which was exactly my intention.’ He looked up and smiled before going back to the sheaf of letters in his hand. ‘There’s a report on that nurse’s death in this morning’s edition of The Telegraph if you want to look.’ He pushed the newspaper towards her, folded open at the appropriate page.

  Flora poured herself a cup of coffee before giving her attention to the newspaper, where a column inch on page four announced the death of a student nurse at St Philomena’s Children’s Hospital. In words that might have come from Dr Reid, the journalist reported that the girl had slipped on wet cobbles and hit her head on a stone kerb. In an apparent attempt to make the story more sensational, the report quoted a police source which suspected she had been attacked by an opportunist thief on the hunt for opiates. Below the article sat a fuzzy drawing of what could have been any young woman.

  Flora pushed the paper away and stirred milk into her cup. ‘Is there anything interesting in the post?’

  ‘Only a notice about these Motor Car Act rules and the new speed restrictions.’ He tapped the letter that lay beside his plate.

  ‘Why do the council need to make so many rules when there are so few motor cars about?’ The tantalizing smell of hot bacon announced their butler’s arrival with Bunny’s breakfast. ‘Are you going to camp out all night like Earl Russell?’

  ‘He did so because he was determined to secure the first registration number issued.’ Bunny chuckled. ‘My number twenty six isn’t nearly as prestigious as his A1. That this system is in place at all indicates that motor cars are here to stay. I told you they weren’t a fad.’

  ‘Indeed you did.’ Flora eyed the sausages, bacon, tomatoes and fried eggs glistening with butter loaded onto his plate. With a small sigh she helped herself to a slice of toast from a silver lattice basket. ‘Just the coffee and toast for me will be all, Stokes.’

  The butler gave her a disapproving look along with his bow of acquiescence as he withdrew.

  ‘Not hungry?’ Bunny looked up at her briefly before attacking a sausage.

  ‘About yesterday,’ she began, avoiding the question. Since the birth of their son, Flora’s clothes fitted too snugly for comfort. If she was to return to her former coltish figure, a little restraint was necessary. ‘We should have waited and talked to the police after that nurse was found.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘They would have kept us hanging about all afternoon, and for what? Look, I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of that poor girl, but it was an accident after all, and we had nothing to tell them.’

  ‘Apart from her brief but intense argument with Sister Lazarus, which no one saw but me,’ she said under her breath and reached for the sugar bowl, but changed her mind at the last second and pushed it away.

  ‘Did you say something, darling?’ Bunny looked up briefly from his plate.

  ‘Only that the older doctor didn’t agree with Dr Reid, did he?’ Flora sipped her coffee, relaxing as the hot, strong brew revived her laggard spirits.

  ‘I think we’ve been here before.’ Bunny looked up, his blue eyes sparkling behind his glasses. ‘Reminds me of our first meeting aboard the Minneapolis, when the captain said that chap Van Elder had died from a fall, but you insisted he’d been murdered?’

  ‘And I was right about that, wasn’t I?’ Flora scraped her toast with an almost invisible layer of butter. ‘Maybe I am on this occasion as well?’

  ‘It was an unfortunate, even a tragic death, but nothing to do with us.’ His tone remained calm, but a pulse at his temple gave a sudden rapid jump. ‘Remember what happened the last time you started poking into matters of death and conspiracy? You were very nearly killed yourself.’ He put down his knife and fork and reached for his coffee cup.

  ‘But suppose—’

  ‘It’s not as if you knew her.’ He cut her off with a wave and pulled the butter dish across the tablecloth.

  ‘No, no I didn’t.’ Flora hadn’t known Marlon van Elder or Evangeline Lange either, but that fact had not prevented her taking an interest in their respective murders. A thought which had occurred to her the day before resurfaced, and discarding her toast, she rose and approached the bureau that occupied an alcove beside the fireplace.

  ‘I think this registration scheme is a good one if they can get it right.’ Bunny reverted to their previous conversation as he examined the papers again. ‘I predict a time when everyone will use petrol-engine vehicles instead of horse-drawn ones.’

  ‘Surely not in our lifetime!’ Flora looked up briefly from where she crouched at the bottom cupboard just as a pile of papers, books and a needlework box tumbled onto the floor, none of which were what she sought.

  ‘The world is moving faster than we think. I’m not so sure about these other rules though, like fines for reckless driving.’

  ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ Her voice echoed slightly in the recesses of the cupboard.

  ‘Perhaps, but who decides what is reckless and what isn’t? The good news is that the speed limit has been increased from fourteen miles an hour to twenty.’

  ‘That’s good news?’ Flora piled the objects haphazardly back into the cupboard, unbent with a grunt and opened one of the upper drawers.

  ‘What are you doing, Flora?’ Bunny twisted to face her with an exasperated sigh. ‘Have you lost something?’

  ‘The box of photographs I keep in here. I haven’t seen them for a while. It looks as if they might have been moved – ah no, here they are.’ She withdrew a pasteboard box from the second drawer and brought it to the table.

  ‘Those belonged to your fath— I mean Riordan, didn’t they?’ Bunny wiped his mouth on his napkin and pushed his plate away. ‘What do you want with those?’

  Flora didn’t react to his slip of the tongue. On occasion, she too forgot that Riordan Maguire, the man who had raised her as his own, was not a blood relative, so she could hardly chastise Bunny for making the same mistake.

  ‘They called them carte de visite when I was a child.’ She sifted through a pile of sepia images mounted on thin card, found those she was looking for and returned the rest to the box.

  Bunny rose and skirted the table, studying the pictures over her shoulder.

  ‘That’s your mother isn’t it?’ He pointed to the image of a fair-haired woman perched on a chair in what was evidently a photographer’s studio. Lily Maguire met the camera lens with confidence and a hint of a smile, her tightly corseted figure held stiffly upright, her delicate hands demurely clasped in her lap. ‘She was a very pretty woman.’

  ‘Yes. She was.’ Flora ran a fingernail across a second image of the same woman on a grass lawn in front of a slightly blurred outline of Cleeve Abbey, her legs stretched out in front of her beneath a long skirt, one had on the crown of her wide straw hat.

  Flora knew every line and blemish of both photographs, but couldn’t remember the woman who had posed for them.

  ‘Why keep the
m in a box?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t they be better framed and put on display?’

  ‘These are the only copies I have, and this one is slightly damaged already. In the daylight, they will fade into nothing, and then I will lose her forever.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that. What made you want to look at them today specifically?’

  ‘You’ll think I’m being ridiculous.’ She looked up into his eyes and summoned her courage, willing him not to dismiss her.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Bunny mused. ‘Ridiculous, was when you ordered the removal of a perfectly functional kitchen range and replaced it with one of those new-fangled Windsor models. However, if you recall, I didn’t say a word.’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’ Flora lifted one eyebrow in his direction. ‘The week-long muttering under your breath was clear enough.’ She came to a decision. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. When I saw Miss Finch for the first time yesterday, I had this strange feeling I was looking at my mother.’

  ‘That’s not possible, Flora.’ The enquiring light in his eyes faded immediately to scepticism. ‘Your mother died when you were a child.’

  ‘No one knows for sure what happened to her.’ He opened his mouth to speak again but she cut him off, ‘Look closely.’ She tapped the image with a fingernail. ‘There’s something about her eyes and the way she held her head which struck me as familiar. They could be the same woman.’

  He sighed, took the photograph from her and peered at it as if he hadn’t seen it a dozen times. ‘This fold in the paper has distorted her features slightly, though I suppose this could be what Miss Finch might have looked like as a young woman. It doesn’t mean she’s the same person.’

  ‘You think I’m imagining it?’ She wanted to make him understand that what she had felt at the time was too strong to be ignored but was unsure how to.

  ‘I concede there’s a resemblance, but no more than that.’ He handed the photograph back to her, slid an arm around her shoulders and rested his cheek against her hair. ‘Have you considered that having so recently had a child yourself, your thoughts naturally turn to your own mother?’

  ‘This was different.’ She licked her lips, summoning her courage. ‘I’m not saying it’s even possible, but just suppose my mother is still alive?’ She hugged the photographs to her chest, unaware until that moment how important it was that he not dismiss her too lightly.

  ‘Flora, I—’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’ She interrupted what she suspected would be another dismissal. ‘After all, her body was never found.’ She voiced a thought she had had thousand times since discovering her mother had not died when Flora was a child as she had been told, but in fact had gone missing.

  ‘Might you have met Miss Finch before, but have simply forgotten?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’ She shrugged out of his hold, irritated. ‘You can rationalize it all you want, but it was like seeing a familiar face in a crowd. You know instinctively it cannot be anyone but them.’

  Flora fidgeted beneath his stare, aware he would prefer she put the past behind her where it belonged. However the mystery of Lily Maguire’s disappearance was one which had plagued her in the two years since Amy Coombe had told her story.

  Now housekeeper at Cleeve Abbey, Amy claimed Lily Maguire had not died when Flora was a child as she had been told, but disappeared after an altercation with Amy’s father, Sam Coombe. A child at the time, Amy had witnessed an argument between Sam and Lily when the latter had tried to get Amy into a women’s refuge rather than be sold onto the streets by her lout of a father.

  ‘Her body was never found,’ Flora insisted. ‘Maybe Sam didn’t kill her that night?’

  ‘What other explanation could there have been?’ He lowered his voice to a sympathetic whisper. ‘If she had survived, why would she have stayed away from you for so long?’

  ‘What if she couldn’t help it?’ Bunny started to interrupt her, but she rushed on, ‘Amy said her father was drunk when she left them arguing. Sam Coombe maintained Lily had simply left, and without a body, the police couldn’t arrest him. What if she—’ she broke off, unable to finish the thought.

  ‘She’s dead, Flora. She must be.’ Bunny sighed on a released breath, apparently unwilling to go over the same ground they had covered many times before. ‘It’s not healthy to dwell on what might have been. You must let go of the past.’

  ‘I know, and you’re probably right.’ Dismayed, she returned the cards to the box and replaced the lid just as a discreet knock at the door preceded the arrival of Milly, their nursery maid, who paused in the door frame, her face as expressionless as a mannequin in Selfridges shop window. Didn’t the girl ever smile?

  ‘Master Arthur has been dressed and fed, Mrs Harrington, if you wish to visit the nursery.’ She bobbed a brief curtsey and waited, her gaze fixed somewhere above Flora’s head.

  ‘Thank you, Milly. I’ll be up in a moment,’ Flora replied, dismissing her.

  ‘What was that about?’ Bunny scowled as the door closed. ‘You aren’t usually so terse with the servants? Has she done something to annoy you?’

  ‘Nothing I can openly complain about. She insists on set times for my visits to the nursery.’ At his incredulous look, she shrugged, ‘It’s the only way I ever get to see Arthur.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bunny’s brusque tone demanded an explanation. Stokes could have set up a wine shop in the cellar for all he would have noticed, but anything concerning the well-being of their son required his full attention.

  ‘In a way it makes sense. I risk upsetting his routine if I arrive unannounced.’ She fiddled with the fringe on a chair back. ‘Milly even chooses his clothes and toys. It’s as though our son is a new toy I’m not allowed to play with.’

  The teddy bear she had bought Arthur was always missing from his crib when she visited, replaced by a surprised-looking bunny rabbit. Its appearance always made her feel rejected, although the baby could not know the difference.

  ‘He’s not yet five months old, darling.’ Bunny chuckled. ‘He doesn’t play with toys yet apart from the soft and fuzzy kind.’ He returned to the table and shuffled his correspondence into order.

  ‘I took him to the park in his perambulator the other day,’ Flora persisted, conscious she sounded petulant. ‘When I got back, Milly said I had kept him too long in the London air.’

  ‘Should I discharge her?’ He peered at her over his spectacles. ‘I could pay a call on Mrs Hunt’s Employment Bureau in Duke Street. If anyone can find a replacement, she could.’

  ‘Er–no, don’t do that.’ The idea had instantly appealed only to be rejected, replaced by practicality. ‘Good nursery staff aren’t easy to find. Besides, even I have to admit that Arthur’s thriving.’ Bunny had researched Milly’s background and training with his usual thoroughness, thus there was nothing Flora felt she could legitimately complain of. If only the girl was more animated; surely babies needed smiles and happiness around them?

  ‘You mustn’t let her bully you.’ Bunny slid the papers into a leather briefcase that sat on an empty chair. ‘Don’t we have a habit of engaging slightly unusual staff?’

  ‘I suppose we do.’ Sally, Flora’s lady’s maid had been engaged mainly because Flora’s mother-in-law disapproved of the girl’s outspoken manner. A decision Flora had never regretted. She couldn’t imagine life without the pert and delightful Sally Pond.

  Another knock at the door was followed by a cough that preceded the return of Stokes.

  ‘Mr Osborne has arrived, madam.’

  ‘Thank you, Stokes.’ Flora’s gaze shifted to the ormolu clock on the mantle as the butler withdrew. ‘He isn’t due for another half-hour.’

  ‘He’s your father, not a visiting tradesman. Now where is William taking you on this treat he won’t reveal to anyone?’ Bunny hefted the briefcase in one hand and made for the door.

  ‘You’ve just answered your own question. He insisted it was to be a surprise.’ Flora
moved to the window that overlooked the street where a gleaming motor car stood at the kerb. ‘Now I know why he’s early. He’s come to show off his new acquisition.’

  Bunny crossed the room in three brisk strides, giving a sharp intake of breath. ‘Good grief, it’s a Spyker!’ The admiration in Bunny’s eyes reminded her of an intensity he normally reserved for her.

  ‘I suppose it is quite pretty with the emerald green and black outlines on the doors,’ she conceded, acknowledging the need to show some enthusiasm.

  William emerged from behind the wheel, apparently to engage with several passers-by who had paused to admire the motor car. He wore a full length camel overcoat, a long yellow scarf wrapped around his neck and a flat leather cap with a pair of driving goggles perched on the peak obscuring his handsome features, but she knew without doubt it was him.

  ‘She’s more than pretty. Under that bonnet is an eighteen horsepower engine, a pressed steel chassis with solid axles and an advanced suspension system of elliptic leaf springs.’

  ‘Well, of course, that makes it all so much clearer.’ Flora rolled her eyes and reached up to plant a kiss on his cheek. ‘And now I know you’ll be happily occupied with William’s new toy, I can spend a few moments with Arthur before we leave.’

  ‘You still can’t bring yourself to call him “father”, can you?’ Bunny asked without looking at her.

  His words halted her at the door, but she didn’t reply other than to direct a smile over one shoulder as she pulled the door shut behind her.

  Through the window on the upper landing, she saw Bunny descend the front steps to where William’s motor car stood at the kerb. Together they circled the brand new vehicle, William gesticulating with enthusiasm, greeted with an occasional nod and smile of approval from Bunny.

  As he had for most of her life, Riordan Maguire still occupied the role of father in her head and to replace him felt like a betrayal. William was, well, William; the dashing young man who had made flying visits to Cleeve Abbey during her childhood, his arms full of gifts and always with a ready story of adventures in far off lands to tell his three nieces and the butler’s daughter. Riordan might not have been her blood, but he deserved the respect due to a loving parent, and that was how she would always remember him.