‘Look, there could be a mistake in the records. It does happen sometimes. Or he might have been registered somewhere else, and just forgotten about it.’
‘Forgotten?’
‘His family could have been out of the area when they registered him.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
But I could see that she didn’t look convinced. ‘He told me he was born in Tamworth Street,’ I said.
‘Did he say that specifically?’
I paused, trying to think back to the old man’s words, while Rachel glared at me impatiently. But my brain was fuzzy. And anyway I didn’t want to think about it, not for a while.
‘Well, did he?’ she repeated.
‘I can’t remember,’ I said, slumping into my armchair.
‘Well, there you are. You can’t remember what you were told in the last few months. And yet you expect an old man to remember the details of something that happened eighty-three years ago.’
‘It’s different.’
She shuffled through her notebook with her head down, so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Her tenseness made me suspicious. Over the months, we’d become so close that I’d learned to read her thoughts as easily as she read mine.
‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘there’s something you’re not telling me.’
She nodded reluctantly. ‘I never thought you were right to trust that woman you called Laura Jenner. All that research she said she’d do... well, I went and did it myself.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. It was while I was visiting my sister. I never went to the matinee of Cats — I was at the Family Records Centre that day instead. I went over all the same ground that Laura Jenner said she’d covered. At first I thought she was a poor researcher, that she was missing too many things. But of course she was lying to you all along, Chris. Everything she did was intended to mislead. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said feebly.
She was looking down at her notebook, and I still couldn’t see her eyes. I experienced the sort of awful feeling in my stomach that I’d only ever read about — a sinking, a plummeting, a dreadful wrench in the belly that foretold bad news. Her manner warned me that there was another revelation to come, just when I thought the whole business was over. And right now I was in no fit state for any more nasty surprises.
‘Get it over with, Rachel, please.’
‘All right. Yes, I checked the indexes myself a long time ago and found there was no Samuel Buckley entered. I went through the actual registers, and there was still no Samuel. I looked hard, Chris. I really looked very hard, in every conceivable place. But the fact is, there’s no record for the birth of anyone called Samuel Buckley. There’s no doubt your great-grandparents only ever registered the birth of one child, and that was your grandfather, George.’
She looked up at me then, watching my face for a reaction. But I was beyond reacting now. I’d already been to the bottom of this pit, and concluded that the whole awful business had been for nothing.
‘It would have been easy at that stage to give up and decide Samuel Buckley didn’t exist,’ she said, ‘that the man claiming to be your great-uncle was a fake. But why should he do something like that? And who was he? It didn’t make sense. I thought there had to be another answer.’
‘And so you made sense of it, did you? You found an answer where I couldn’t?’
She flushed and turned back to her notebook. ‘I found the answer here in Lichfield, in the County Records Office. In the records of the Thomas Ella Trust, in fact.’
‘Hold on. Thomas Ella?’
‘Yes, the Reverend Thomas Ella.’
‘The canal proprietor?’
‘The same man.’
‘Samuel wrote more about him than any of the other proprietors,’ I said. ‘He described him as a visionary, who was almost single-handedly responsible for getting the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal scheme under way. He was a prominent personality, the headmaster of a local school.’
‘He also said that Ella was “a real gentleman and scholar”, generous, public spirited, a conscientious teacher and a good father,’ Rachel added.
‘Yes, all that and plenty more.’ I could see the appropriate page of the manuscript in front of my eyes as I spoke. ‘The Reverend Thomas Ella took snuff, gambled at cards and enjoyed brandy and wine. He bought silver buckles for his shoes and had silk handkerchiefs. He raised pigs. He was secretary of a circulating library and took an active interest in local politics. Oh, and his first wife had died, but he married again and had five children. It’s all imprinted on my memory after the book. Samuel made him sound like a hero.’
‘And with good reason, I think.’
I watched Rachel carefully. ‘Go on.’
‘There was another thing Samuel wrote about Thomas Ella. Do you remember the death of his son, who lived for only three weeks?’
‘Ella baptised him at a private service, but he died ten days later. Yes, of course I remember. But what has that got to do with anything?’
‘Something came from Thomas Ella’s desolation at the loss of his son. Ella wasn’t just a clergyman, a headmaster, and all the rest. He also founded charities. One of them was a charity for orphans. It was called the Thomas Ella Trust. It survived into the 1930s, then fell into disuse. Until then it had been very active.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Well, bear in mind that the Adoption of Children Act didn’t come in until 1926. That was the act that made adoptions legal in England and Wales. Before that, they had to be arranged privately via the Poor Law Union, or through certain charities. Charities like the Thomas Ella Trust.’
I let my head fall back onto the chair. I felt exhausted, drained of all energy. It seemed to have run out of me in floods since I nearly got myself killed for the second time at Fosseway Wharf.
‘So Samuel was adopted,’ I said. ‘After all that, Samuel was adopted.’
Rachel nodded eagerly, glad to get it over with. ‘You see, Chris, that was why family was so important to him. He was so grateful to have been taken in as one of their own that he put his heart and soul into being part of the family.’
‘Yes, all right. I can see that.’
‘But when he ran off with Mary, he betrayed it all. Of course, the Buckleys never forgave him. But Samuel accepted that as a right and natural outcome of his actions. He understood that George and his family didn’t want to know him any more. The worst thing by far was that Samuel never, ever forgave himself. Right until the end.’
She was right, of course. ‘He was carrying a huge burden of guilt,’ I said. ‘“There was a far worse betrayal”. Those were his words. He’d been trying to put it right ever since. It’s funny, really, that in the end he had to rely on another generation to finish the job for him.’
For a moment I saw myself as Samuel must have seen me — the next in a long line of ordinary human beings who happened to carry the same genes as William and Josiah Buckley. I was just an average man with many weaknesses, to whom he had to pass on the baton. And yet he’d trusted me not to drop it. He’d been sure I would carry out my part. Because I was one of the family. I was a Buckley.
Rachel closed her notebook and came to sit next to me on the sofa, her face full of concern.
‘That’s it, Chris. There’s no more.’
‘It’s enough. More than enough.’
‘I’m sorry. But it’s best to know the truth, isn’t? There have been enough secrets and lies.’
‘You’re right, Rachel. Thank you.’
Even after all these months, I hadn’t escaped the images that haunted my thoughts. At night I still saw the old horse emerging from the fog under the bridge, hauling the boat that had brought William Buckley to Fosseway Wharf for that fatal meeting. I still saw the figure in the darkness, waiting to crush his skull with a boat hook and conceal his body in a heap of abandoned lime. And I saw that terrible oily swirling in the water behind the lock gate as Josiah Buckley’s wife Hannah watched her husband’s battered face float to the surface.