Cowards Die Many Times

by Peter Hey

  Jane felt the flush of embarrassment returning but pushed it aside. ‘There was one particular area I wanted to focus on. Your and Guy’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Ramsbottom. You have him down as dying in 1874.’

  Betty nodded. ‘I haven’t really looked at him for quite a while. I’m spending my time on my mother’s side these days. I started off with the Ramsbottoms, what with it being my own surname, but then I thought, that’s just patriarchal nonsense. My genes, my DNA come just as much from my female line. And given that men have done precious little child rearing in the past, what makes me who I am is down to all those women. And what women they were! Some of them raised huge families in houses as small as this one. On so little money. And half of them died in childbirth. Well, not half, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Jane, grateful for the opportunity to interrupt Betty’s enthusiastic flow. ‘It was a very different world. But going back to Thomas Ramsbottom—'

  ‘Yes,’ responded Betty, her head nodding rapidly. ‘I went back and refreshed my memory this morning. He was the coal miner who passed away when he was only 37.’

  Jane had been cradling her teacup and placed it carefully on its saucer. ‘I don’t think he did.’

  Betty raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? That’s interesting. I’m sure I found a death record for him.’

  ‘You found an index entry for a Thomas Ramsbottom who died in the adjacent registration district. His age was right, so I guess you assumed it was the one you were looking for.’

  Betty lifted a finger in a gesture of recollection. ‘That’s right. And there were no others where the age matched up, so it had to be him. By a logical process of elimination. He was just staying a few miles away for some reason.’

  Jane reached into a bright-red satchel and pulled out some papers. ‘Trouble is, there was another Thomas Ramsbottom born in the same year. You might have missed him because he spent the first part of his life in Yorkshire.’

  ‘So how can we be sure which one died?’ asked Betty, slightly deflated.

  ‘I ordered a death certificate. It arrived yesterday and confirmed what I suspected.’ Jane handed over the document. ‘His father is named as the informant and he’s called Levi. There are no Levis in your family. Also, the place of death ties in with where the other Thomas was living on the census just three years earlier. There’s a slight confusion because he was a lodger and his landlord got his details a bit wrong – that’s not uncommon – but nonetheless the evidence is pretty conclusive.’

  Betty studied the certificate and then looked up. ‘But our Thomas had to die about that time. By 1881 his wife is listed as a widow and his last child, my great-grandfather, was born in 1872. It’s a relatively small window. Why can’t we find his death? Or have you?’

  Jane shook her head. ‘No, I can’t find any record of it. I wanted to ask if you had any family mementos, old letters... Anything that might give us a pointer?’

  Betty leant sideways and lifted a cardboard filing box that had been tucked beside her chair. She sat it on her knee and expanded it like a concertina. She flicked through the pockets and pulled out two pieces of A4 paper, one of which was a handwritten page of notes.

  ‘This will interest you,’ she said, handing over one of the sheets. ‘I was sent it by a distant cousin who was also researching the Ramsbottoms. He copied it for me on the understanding I wouldn’t put it online. It’s Thomas Ramsbottom, our Thomas Ramsbottom. With his wife and children.’

  Jane’s eyes opened wide. It was a scan of an old photograph that was somewhat chewed at the edges and had the name of a photographic studio printed across the bottom. It was partly faded and water stained but depicted a seated couple surrounded by five standing children with another infant on the mother’s lap. No doubt in keeping with the then-current convention, the expressions were all stern and unsmiling. There was a noticeable contrast in the appearances of the husband and wife. He was blond, youthful and attractive. She looked older, decidedly plain and somewhat overweight. The children were a mixture of their parents apart from the oldest boy, in his mid teens, who strongly resembled his father. Written in blue biro across the top was the text, ‘Early cabinet card showing Thomas and Sarah Ramsbottom. Circa 1871’.

  Jane spoke without raising her gaze from the image in front of her. ‘It would be good to see the original. It might hold some more clues.’

  ‘I lost touch with the man who sent it me,’ replied Betty. ‘He stopped replying to emails and I’ve a horrible feeling he’s no longer with us. But I’ve just been reading the notes I made at the time. He’d heard a family story that Thomas was a nasty piece of work who left his wife and all those kids. It was even suggested he sailed off to America. I seem to remember looking at his picture and finding it hard to believe. He looks so lovely. Then I found what I thought was his death. I suppose I reasoned that even if he had walked out on his family, he wouldn’t have moved much further than the next town. Daddy’s gone abroad is a story you tell kiddies, isn’t it?’

  Jane didn’t reply. The last casual remark resonated hurtfully, and she had to turn her face away, towards the window and the plastic cat still clicking and waving at no-one and everyone. On every beat of its paw, Jane found her thoughts towards blond, handsome Thomas Ramsbottom darkening. He was elevated from a name on a few dusty historic records to someone real, someone close. Someone who had to be tracked down and held to account, punished in absentia, a long-dead whipping boy for a more recent crime.

  Hannah, Annie and Captain William H F P Bains

  It was some kind of dodgy scam but Jane almost fell for it.

  Her mind was elsewhere, full of thoughts of Thomas Ramsbottom and the repercussions of a father’s betrayal. She was checking her inbox quickly and the message asking her to verify her email account had seemed plausible and convincing. It was professionally laid out and well-written, without the jarring grammatical errors normally committed by small-time cybercriminals on the other side of the world. It warned of a recent security alert and recommended she login again to check her settings. It was tedious computer admin and she just wanted to get on with her research. She was just about to click as requested when she woke up and remembered she was supposed to be more careful. Tommy had once shown her how to hover the mouse over a link to see its real destination. Sure enough, the latter part of the Internet address looked reasonable but it began with a website name that was decidedly suspect. She thought about forwarding the email to her provider, but decided she couldn’t be bothered. These things went out in their thousands. Let someone else report it if they wanted to. Nothing much ever seemed to happen anyway. The would-be phisher would simply create a new address and Jane’s inbox would still be riddled with spam tomorrow.

  She was back in Nottingham, sitting at her dining table and now found herself frantically hunting for her laptop’s power cable. Its battery life certainly wasn’t what it used to be. Tommy was right: it was getting old. She made a mental note to buy a new one when this case was complete.

  Plugged into the mains, she could finally focus on searching for evidence of Thomas Ramsbottom journeying overseas. Betty said the family rumour suggested America, but Jane had remote cousins who emigrated to Australia and Canada at around the same time, so she kept her options open. She began with a narrow time frame, the 1871 to 1881 period from his last English census appearance to the date his wife began calling herself a widow, and then gradually threw her net wider. There were no Thomas Ramsbottoms who seemed to fit. There was one candidate living in Ohio on the 1880 US federal census who briefly seemed promising. He was roughly the right age, but his American children were in their early 20s and they and he turned up living in the same state ten years earlier.

  Jane gave up on looking abroad and returned to the UK. As Betty had proposed, maybe he hadn’t moved far after all. Jane searched for shortened forms of his first name, including Tom, Tommy, Thos and Thom. Ramsbottom was not a surname that was often mis
spelled, but she used wildcards to pick up other possible variations such as Ramsbotham and Ramsbotom. No matter what she did, the man seemed to have disappeared. Jane knew there could be gaps in the records. Historically, files had often been damaged and lost, paperwork being perpetually susceptible to flood and fire. Sometimes people were hidden by faded ink or incorrect transcription. Instinctively, however, Jane felt she was missing something. Her quarry must have left some trace somewhere.

  Jane began to wonder if he could have changed his name. Her grandmother’s Aunt Annie had been born Hannah, but she preferred to be called Annie and this was the name she reported to officialdom throughout her adult life. On electoral registers she was Annie and she was Annie on her death certificate. She was born some 60 years later than Thomas. If she had gotten away with living under an effective alias in the burgeoning bureaucracy of the 20th century, then presumably Thomas would have found it even easier. And besides, Jane knew that English law had always allowed people to call themselves what they wanted so long as it wasn’t for the purposes of fraud. Why Thomas would have adopted a different name was open for speculation. Perhaps he didn’t want to be found by his wife’s angry family. Clearly, if he changed his surname, the options were myriad. A change of Christian name was more manageable.

  Jane simply omitted a first name from her searches and found him almost immediately. She’d become stuck in a way of working and it was an obvious step she should have tried much earlier. A Jos or Joseph Ramsbottom had reportedly arrived in New York in March 1873 aboard Royal Mail Ship Algeria. The steamer’s manifest listed the 500 passengers on board and was submitted to the state’s immigration authorities when she berthed. It was to be hoped that her master, William H F P Bains, employed better seamen than he did scribes. The writing was as unnecessarily elaborate as the number of the captain’s initials, and it took Jane some time to decipher the exuberant loops and swirls. Jos Ramsbottom was described as a 37 year-old male labourer from England travelling in steerage. Jane zoomed in on his first name as it was partially obscured by a letter swooping down from the line above. On closer inspection, it wasn’t Jos as the transcriber had supposed, but Thos.

  Jane leaned back in her chair and grinned. Thomas Ramsbottom hadn’t changed his name to escape the wrath of his wife. He didn’t need to: he’d put 3,000 miles of ocean between them. Here he was, exactly the right age, leaving England for America soon after the birth of their last child. Jane felt sure this had to be her man.

  ‘Got you, you selfish, good-for-nothing bastard,’ she said out loud.

  Castle Garden

  The pilot, a weather-beaten rock of a man with a salt-stiffened white beard, had taken command and was guiding the huge iron liner slowly and carefully through the maze of channels formed by shifting bars and rocky shoals. Sails tightly furled, the single funnel puffed faint wisps of smoke that drifted off on the light breeze. The sun was rising in a clear sky and the sea was placid for the first time in days. The ship no longer throbbed with exertion, but ploughed effortlessly through tidal currents that might have troubled a lesser vessel.

  People began to gather on deck and watch expectantly as the narrows began to open out into a vast bay flanked by gently sloping countryside, pale winter brown in the morning light. They steamed past smaller, isolated communities and then a murmur of anticipation broke into a huge cheer as their destination came into sight. In the distance, a mighty city rose from the water, flanked on either side by sisters of almost equal scale. Their shorelines were a forest of masts and behind them churches and factory chimneys rose above the rooftops. The foundation piers of some future great bridge could just be made out, promising competition to the flotilla of small boats that were already busy plying their trade across the waterways. It was a spectacle that shouted prosperity and opportunity, a New World.

  In better spirits, he might have taken out the pencil and pad given him by the minister’s wife and tried to capture the scene, but he had been feeling sick for the entire passage. The crossing from Liverpool to the Irish port of Queenstown had been relatively calm, but even then the nausea had begun. Once on the open Atlantic, the captain and the weather confined them below deck and the crashing, rolling seas had him reaching for that foul-smelling bucket, day and night. The ship was only half full, but the section of steerage reserved for single men was still cramped, dark and airless. The narrow bunks were hard and seemed to be infested with something foul and lousy that made him itch beneath the clothing he hadn’t removed in a fortnight. Now, he wanted to share the elation of his fellow passengers, but he was too weak. He seemed to ache everywhere and there was an odd rash breaking out on his stomach. And he didn’t understand why he had woken up hot and sweating on a cold March morning.

  There was a sharp slap on his back and he turned to see a younger man with bright blue eyes and dark-brown curls grinning with excitement.

  ‘Now isn’t she a fine sight! Even grander than Dublin Bay herself, don’t you think?’ beamed the Irishman.

  The other man simply nodded without enthusiasm. He had never seen Dublin Bay but didn’t have the energy to make the observation. He just wanted to be left alone. Instead he received another slap, this time to the shoulder.

  ‘What’s the matter, sheep’s arse? We’re not feeling sick again, are we? You Englishmen aren’t cut from the same cloth as us good, strong Irish boys, now are you now? Sheep’s arse?’

  The glint in his blue eyes faded slightly when the Irishman became aware of a third figure standing behind him. He turned and was confronted by a heavy-set man with a bulbous face and hands like shovels, shovels that had been battered from years of hacking black rock from narrow seams.

  The Irishman made an exaggerated pointing gesture towards the newcomer. ‘And top of the morning to you too, sir! I was just saying what a fine sight—'

  His cheerful lilt was interrupted by a less melodious voice. ‘I heard what you were saying, lad. That joke’s getting wearisome.’

  ‘Ah, it’s just a bit of craic.’

  ‘I’ll give you a bit of a crack,’ said the third man humourlessly. ‘Now leave me and my pal be. Or you’ll be getting off this here boat with a fat lip.’

  The accent was thick and unfamiliar. The young Irishman struggled to distinguish the exact words, but their meaning was clear. He smiled, bowed his head and pretended to doff a cap that he wasn’t wearing. He then sauntered off towards another group of men talking animatedly further down the ship.

  The sickly looking man put his hand on his forehead, lifting the fringe of his straight blonde hair. His fingers had once been delicately formed, but they too bore the calluses and scars of manual labour. ‘Thank you, Henry,’ he said.

  ‘I know you’re not feeling right, Tom,’ said his companion, ‘but I’ve told you. You need to stand up to these folk. Don’t let them mither you. Once they start they don’t let up.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ve been there before. It’s just…’ replied Tom, searching for an excuse. ‘I’m feeling worse if owt. I just want to get off this damned beggar of ship. Stand on something that isn’t forever pitching and swaying.’

  Henry turned to face the urban sprawl that was starting to fill the skyline. ‘It won’t be long now, lad. We’ll soon be on that train and on our way to Ohio. We’ll be digging American coal before you know it.’

  The Cunarder dropped anchor in midstream off the southern tip of the main city. She was met by steam tugs and lighters, and her passengers and their trunks were transferred to a landing stage alongside an old circular fortification with casemated walls imposingly built of red sandstone. Built to repel attack from the British, it now greeted them, along with immigrants from all over the world. Prior to its establishment by the State of New York, new arrivals had often fallen victim to exploitative scams, being sold tickets for fictitious trains, money at exorbitant rates of exchange or rooms in non-existent tenements. Castle Garden housed state officials, agents of the railroad companies, exchange brokers, multilingual
letter writers, licensed boarding-house keepers and a labor exchange. Beneath the glass-domed rotunda people could also store their baggage and would sleep on its floors and benches if they had no bed for the night. Those arriving sick were ferried to state hospitals on islands in the East River. It was a well-intentioned service, but as ever, bureaucracy demanded compliance and control, so that it became a confusing ordeal amongst a crowded mass of people and a Babel-like cacophony of languages. For Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, kesselgarten became a generic term for disorder and chaos. Nonetheless, this was a time before passports, visas and immigration law. Ellis Island would not open its doors for nearly 20 years. If you made it to New York you got to stay. You just had to pass through Castle Garden first.

  Tom and Henry joined a long queue and shuffled towards their first interview. A finely dressed gentleman was asking questions. He was flanked by other, clearly lesser, men whose role was presumably to police the line and ensure no-one slipped by unchecked. As the two miners approached, it became obvious this was a brief medical screening. Henry told his pale companion to stand up straight and look strong. Tom promptly collapsed to the floor.

  Windows on a life

  Jane had found Thomas Ramsbottom, hopefully her Thomas Ramsbottom, crossing to New York, but she immediately lost him again. She shouldn’t have been surprised: her earlier searches had found no trace of him living in America. She focused in, revitalised by the ship’s manifest and its 1873 date of arrival, but he still eluded her. Most specifically, she could find no-one amongst the 50 million individuals in the 1880 federal census who looked like any kind of match.

  Assuming he hadn’t simply slipped the enumerator’s net, what had happened to him in those seven short years? Had he died? Had he changed his name, perhaps in a deliberate effort to hide away and build a new life? Had he stayed in New York or moved on, maybe travelling to the territories then expanding in the west? Jane had some experience tracing a branch of her mother’s family who’d emigrated across the Atlantic. She knew that different states, sometimes different counties, maintained their own records of birth, marriage and death. Some were digitised, some not. Not knowing where Thomas had been headed made the task much more difficult. Where exactly did one start?