‘It is quite urgent that I speak with her. I owe her a great debt, you see. She saved my life, yet I had entrusted her care into one of my servants, and he abandoned her to great peril, and I must apologise. Sadly Miss Williams took ill before I had a chance to address this terrible state of affairs. And you can see ... you can see how badly I am affected by this terrible state of affairs. Therefore it is a necessity that you share with me her whereabouts.’
Elaine cleared her throat, before launching in with her eminently sensible voice, ‘It has all been very tragic. She refuses to speak of her time in Simla – it’s as if the trauma of finding her brother has caused her to lose all memory of her time there. Perhaps if you come back tomorrow morning, after you have had time to recover from the arduous journey here, we can talk more, over tea?’
Recognising that uniquely British way of politely dismissing guests, the Raja nodded, defeated by their English manners. These women had cared for Sarah, and now they were protecting her. He could understand that.
His travelling retinue were already waiting for him, and he was settled inside his carriage before he spoke to the women again, ‘Tomorrow then. Thank you, ladies. It is thus that the heart shall have to wait a few beats more.’ Thumping his walking stick on the roof, the carriage moved off.
‘What do you think, Elaine?’
‘There’ll be trouble if we let him see her. She’s not right. I don’t think she’ll ever be right now, but this will just set her back after everything we’ve done.’
‘So we’ll just say that she’s gone, then?’
Elaine nodded, her greying curls bouncing unhindered under the Indian sky.
THE SERMON
Warden Price sat on the wooden pew, hat clasped in his lap, well aware of the admiring glances the young women seated around him were casting his way. His mind was focused on the job at hand, which should have been the worship of Christ, but instead was more about reading the faces of the congregation. Was there anyone here he recognised? Was there anyone there with a hint of Sarah about them?
The priest droned on interminably about sloth, extolling the poor parishioners to work harder, to look upon laziness as a sin. It was a wonder anyone ever attended church to be lectured like this. The church was full of people who looked like all they did was work hard. Patched clothes, faded trousers, chafed hands and wind-damaged faces. There were very few people sitting in these pews who looked like they lived a life of Victorian luxury. In Price’s mind, the most slothful persons there were the priest and his lackeys.
Price was all for religious worship, but he preferred his messengers of God to be a bit more of this world – more like Reverend Young and his wife Christine in Bruce Bay. Additionally, a married reverend was far better placed to understand his parishioners and their sins than this man pontificating at the front of the church.
The building was so full of extended families in large clusters of several generations, that it was impossible for Price to recognise who went with whom. He had no idea if Sarah Bell’s family was large or small, whether she was an only child, or one of many. Self-doubt began to seep in. It could turn out to be a fruitless journey, this quest to locate Sarah, and Bryce Sinclair. And then there was the possibility that she may not even be interested in seeing him. After all, there’d been no agreement entered into, just a feeling, the feeling you only get once in a lifetime.
The service over, the crowd rose as if released from purgatory with the flick of a wand. The tidal wave of churchgoers made for the door, politely making way for the elderly and the women, the children showing a level of respect unheard of in modern times. Price held back, nodding politely at the strangers who met his eyes, some curious, some outright flirting. There. A whisk of a skirt, and glimpse of a brow, the corner of an eye. Sarah?
There were too many people in his way. He lost sight of her. The hotelier from the Wains Hotel laid a hand on his arm, ‘Mister Price, let me introduce you to Bishop Dasent, he too is newly arrived in Dunedin.’
The blackness around the Bishop wasn’t confined to his cassock. There was an aura emanating from the man, and he was even more distasteful up close than when he was castigating the congregation.
‘How lovely to meet you,’ Bishop Dasent greeted Price, his words not reaching his eyes. For a man ordained to save souls, it didn’t appear to Price that he himself had one.
‘Bishop Dasent,’ Price was curt, looking beyond the Bishop for any sign of the woman who had that wisp of familiarity to her.
‘Mister Price has travelled from Bruce Bay. He was telling us over supper that there was a theft from the church there just before he left. How anyone could desecrate a church like that is an affront to Christ.’ As a godly man, the hotelier crossed himself, his eyes shining with the fervour of the righteous. ‘Did you hear about the theft, Bishop Dasent?’
The Bishop steepled his fingers, his eyes travelling over the sorry-looking congregation he’d inherited. The theft of the candelabra was, of course, known to him – the result he’d anticipated once he’d heard such valuable items had been gifted to a church in the middle of nowhere, instead of to his diocese, but he wasn’t about to tell these peasants of his knowledge.
‘No, that is indeed a shock.’ Looking behind him, he summoned forward his assistant, who’d been hovering around like a seagull hankering after food scraps. ‘Norman, please remind me this afternoon to write to the minister at ... where?’
‘Bruce Bay, it’s on the West Coast, several days travel away from here,’ the hotelier offered helpfully.
‘Yes, thank you. The minister at Bruce Bay, to enquire about their theft.’
Norman’s mouth gaped like a carp, well aware that the Bishop had already destroyed the correspondence relating to the candelabra. He nodded enthusiastically, so used to ingratiating himself with the Bishop, that his ability to discern right from wrong, truth from lies, had long since disappeared.
His lies dispensed, the Bishop moved away to find someone more worthy of his time. A hotelier and a drifter from the back country were hardly worth his precious breath.
Puffed up with pride that the Bishop had conversed with him, the hotelier attempted to introduce Price to those still milling around at the back of the church, eager for local gossip, but Price was past pleasantries. He knew the woman he’d glimpsed must have been a relation of Sarah Bell’s. His heart knew it. Shaking off the other man’s hand, he pushed through the knot of parishioners into the daylight, the fresh air a balm to a man who felt constrained inside the hypocritical walls of this church.
Casting his eyes down the slope, all he saw were the erect backs of women held up by whalebone stays, and strict upbringings. Children were delighting in their own freedom. Fire-and-brimstone preaching were mere gibberish to the ears of children who’d wiggled and squirmed on the uncomfortable pews, release a few short steps away.
There. At the bottom of the hill. Turning right. The turn of the hips, the shoulders held back. The auburn highlights in her hair.
His long stride an asset, he raced down the hill, one hand holding his hat on, barely refraining from calling out to the woman, to Sarah. Ignoring the startled glances of the families returning home for their weekly roast in their Sunday best, he hurtled towards the woman. Breath ragged in his throat, he reached her, grabbed her shoulder, spun her around.
THE SHOW
Thumping her fist against the workroom table was the closest Patricia came to violence. Just look where her friend had led her. Patricia wanted to grab Sarah’s head and knock it against the nearest brick wall – bugger its heritage listing. Georgian bricks were as good as post-war mortar-bound bricks. She’d promised she’d see Sarah after the shop closed, and that had been a good hour ago. The shadows stretched so long across the floor, they threatened to consume her.
Time ticked on, pushing her closer to the door, and to her friend. What on earth was she thinking? She had a fashion show to prepare for. She shouldn’t be leaving her studio to discuss the fine
r intricacies of time travel.
Fuck it. She had to go, she’d promised. Well, the least Sarah could do was drive her to the venue, the Foundling Museum in the city. They could talk while she was prepping. Decision made. She heaved one last box into her arms, locked the shop, and went next door, using her set of keys to let herself in.
Climbing the stairs, she tugged on the fraying light cord at the top. Light flooded the apartment, and she found Sarah still asleep in her bedroom. The smell of abandonment clung to the rooms. This had been one area Patricia had left to the police to search, wanting nothing about her friend’s disappearance to tarnish her reputation. Whilst she believed Sarah’s claims of time travel, she’d kept that information to herself. Let the police turn themselves inside out finding Sarah and her parents. Keeping Sarah’s business afloat had been above and beyond anyone’s call of duty, but she’d done it, and she was tired of running both Sarah’s life and her own.
The newspapers had run several stories about the shop being haunted, what with all three family members disappearing in peculiar circumstances. One of the detectives had scoffed at that, preferring his theory that Sarah had run off to perpetuate the rumour of a haunting in order to increase visitors to the store, which everyone acknowledged was on the brink of insolvency. Or it had been, until Nicole had been hired to run it. ‘A magic touch’ was how Trish and Andrew had described Nicole after her first month running the shop. Fresh stock, tidier shelves, a window display devoid of desiccated insect carcasses. Shoppers liked the concept of a cluttered antique shop, but they preferred shopping somewhere slightly more curated. And that was exactly what Nicole had achieved.
‘Sarah, Sarah, wake up.’
‘No,’ came the sulky reply.
Trish sat on the bed, and waited. She looked around the bedroom with its grandma-style rose patterned wallpaper, and extra wide skirting boards. It was the mirror image of the upstairs to her shop, which she leased but hadn’t used other than for storage. She really should develop it and utilise it a dash more effectively than she did at the moment – the faded forties glamour could be played up. Shaking herself out of her reverie, she again tried rousing her friend, the one person she really didn’t want to be spending time with right now, given that she felt an overwhelming desire to throttle her.
‘Sarah, you can’t pretend the world doesn’t exist. You actually have to face it. Come on, sleepy head, I’ll help you think up a story for the police, but right now, I need you to get out of bed, and come help me start setting up for my show tomorrow night. You know more about the bloody props Nicole has packed for me than I do, and if you won’t get up to help me, I’ll drag you down to the nearest police station and tell them that you’re mentally unstable, and need to be committed. So there are your options. You either help me, or I tell the police you’re a nutcase and should be locked up. What’s it going to be?’
Sarah rolled over to face her friend, eyes puffy from a combination of crying and lack of sleep. ‘Fine, I’ll help you, as long as you promise to feed me, and let me use the hot water at your place. If I have to have another cold shower, I’ll march myself down to the police station, if only to use the hot showers at whichever mental institution they commit me to.’
‘Hah, that’s more like it! Come on, I’ve only got a short window at the museum for my set-up tonight, and tomorrow is going to be frenetic. All the clothes are being delivered in the morning, so I need to get as much done this evening as I can. And then I promise we’ll go back to mine, have showers and a curry. Yes?’
Sarah swung her legs out of bed, her hair worthy of a nest for a family of starlings, ‘Yup, let’s do it. It’s the hot shower that swung it in your favour, you know that, right?’
Laughing, the two friends hugged, before Sarah threw on warmer clothes for the evening air.
Patricia loaded the last box into the back of the van, and slipped into the driver’s seat, Sarah’s hands not up to the job of steering it.
‘Where are you having your show?’ Sarah asked.
‘At the Foundling Museum. It’s perfect. Creepy, but perfect. Have you been there before?’
‘No, I don’t even know where it is.’
‘It’s in Brunswick Square, in the city. Parking is a nightmare normally, but today and tomorrow we get to use their loading zone. I’m picking tonight’s set-up is going to be completely spooky, kind of like Night at the Museum, but surrounded by abandoned children.’
‘Abandoned children? Orphans?’ Sarah’s eyes were wide in the dark, lit only by the street lights they were hurtling past and the minimal dashboard lights in the decrepit vehicle.
‘No, not orphans – abandoned children. The parents, usually mothers, would bring them to the hospital if they couldn’t look after them any more. You’ll see when we get there. It’s not the original hospital, though – that was pulled down. This is a replacement one, but they reused loads of the interiors. Can you believe that? Anyway, it’s like taking a step back in time.’ Looking sideways at her friend, she added, ‘So, right up your alley then!’
Sarah smiled, her eyes misting up, holding her own counsel.
They pulled up to the Foundling Museum’s back entrance, directed by the shortest Indian security guard Sarah had ever seen.
‘Pull into that bay there – best to back it in, make it easier to unload. If you wait until I’ve locked up behind you, I can give you a hand to lift it all in,’ he said.
‘That would be fantastic, thank you,’ Patricia enthused. ‘We’ve got two hours to set up tonight, is that right, Ravi?’
‘Yes, two hours, that’s why I’ll give you a hand to unload it all and get it inside, then I’ll have to go back to the security office.’
The trio toiled together, Sarah to a much lesser degree, her hands still too sore to carry anything heavy, and in less than ten minutes the van had been emptied of its contents, with the pile of boxes neatly assembled in the corner of a room decorated only with heavy sideboards and towers of stacked corporate seating.
‘Thanks for the help, Ravi, we’ll give you a call when we’re done. Same number as before?’
‘Yes, same number. Can’t ever change that number, too many casting agents have it.’ Ravi smiled at the women, and gave a theatrical bow before returning to his office. It was a lonely job being the night security guard at a museum, especially one as peculiarly odd as the Foundling Museum.
Whilst the two women were meant to be confined to the function room, Sarah wandered into the adjoining one. Patricia sorted through her labelled cartons, deciding which ones had to be unpacked first, based on the comprehensive lists taped to the sides of each.
Sarah called out descriptions of the more interesting articles on display in the next room, ‘This is heartbreaking – it’s an engraved coin, a token the mother left with her baby daughter, so she could recognise her if she ever came back to claim her. It says here that the baby Charlotte Louise, renamed Ethel Maud – who on earth would choose Ethel over Charlotte for a start – died a year after being delivered to the Foundling Hospital for safe keeping. The token has been beautifully engraved with the face and wings of an angel. And here’s another one, but this story is even worse. This baby boy, James Allen, renamed Charles Henry, was left with a thimble, engraved with his parents’ initials, but by the time his mother came back for him – can you believe it, four years later – he’d died too. I don’t know if I can read any more of these. My heart is dying here. Are you ready to start unpacking?’
‘I’m laying out the boxes in order now. Just promise me you won’t touch a thing! Seriously, it’s probably best if you come back in here, and sit down. I don’t want to get in trouble. Ravi is pretty good, but he’ll be watching on the CCTV, and probably getting a little antsy about you being in there. God knows what he’d do if he saw you disappear suddenly on screen.’
Sarah wandered back, pulled up a chair, and watched her friend skitter about like a nervous foal. ‘Why don’t you just start with the first box? In
stead of figuring out whereabouts in the room they go?’
‘Because I labelled everything to make it easier.’
‘To be honest, Trish, it’s not looking like it’s that easy from here.’
Trish laughed her northern laugh, and carried on checking her lists, moving boxes like pawns on a chessboard.
‘Can you imagine being abandoned by your parents in a place like this? Well, worse than a place like this because this isn’t even the original hospital. Did you know that two thirds of the babies left here died? Basically, most of those babies would’ve been better off being left on the doorstep of the nearest church, than being left here.’
‘You know, Sarah, effectively you’re a foundling.’
‘What?’
Taking a deep breath, Patricia addressed the elephant in the room, Sarah’s disappearance. ‘Your parents abandoned you, here in England. They certainly haven’t come back, although you seemed to have figured it out pretty easily. How many times have you been and gone now?’
Sarah examined her hands, the grazes scabbing over. She picked at the edge of one of the scabs. Trish was right. She’d come back every time – but was that because it was all tied in with the Elizabeth Williams estate? Was that the key her parents didn’t have? But that didn’t explain how both her mother and then her father had disappeared in the first place. A tiny spot of blood welled up at the corner of the scab. Fascinated, she watched the tiny ball of blood quiver, as it decided whether to grow or coagulate. To stay or to go. Had her parents decided to stay in their new realities because their new lives were that much better than their life with her? She pushed down hard on the edge of the scab; she didn’t want to think about that possibility any further.
‘Maybe it was just because of Elizabeth Williams? For all I know, maybe Dad had bought from her in the past. I could go through all his purchase books. That would take days, but it could be done ...’ She was trying to persuade herself that her parents just hadn’t had an opportunity to find their way home. Changing the subject she asked, ‘How do you know Ravi then? You guys seem to know each other quite well.’
The Last Letter Page 18