The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7), Nathan Goodwin [little red riding hood ebook TXT] 📗

‘Chicago… Never to return. He was given a share of the reward money and I found his passage out of the country two days after the trial ended. He went out under the pseudonym of John Fothergill.’

‘Well, what does that tell you?’ Arthur muttered.

‘That they were much more than just smuggling friends?’ Clara suggested with another titter.

‘It certainly looks that way, yes,’ Morton agreed. ‘But, it seems Ann’s love life was a little more complex than that. As you know, I was waiting for the DNA results to come through. It took quite a lot of work to separate the various strands of your DNA, Arthur, but, using various online family trees and making links with some of your distant relatives on the Lost Cousins website, I’ve managed to identify the father of Ann’s baby.’

‘Well, go on!’ Clara encouraged. ‘Don’t keep us in suspense.’

Morton felt as though he should be asking for a drumroll, seeing the eagerness in their eyes. ‘His name was Jonas Blackwood—’

‘Oh, my goodness! The Principal Officer conducting the smuggling and murder investigations. So, he was one of the two…bricked up in the chimney…’ Clara said.

‘Yes, I’m afraid I believe so,’ Morton confirmed.

Morton closed his front door behind him with a sigh. He was grateful to be home, and grateful to have closed the Fothergill Case.

Juliette appeared from the lounge with Grace in her arms.

‘Dadda!’ Grace yelled.

‘Watch this, Dadda,’ Juliette said, taking a few steps backwards and placing Grace on the floor, standing. ‘Walk to Dadda.’

Grace smiled knowingly and, with deep concentration on her face, took six tentative steps into Morton’s outstretched arms.

‘Good girl, Grace!’ he said, planting a big kiss on her lips. ‘Well done!’

‘Wine?’ Juliette offered.

‘Absolutely,’ he replied.

‘No,’ Grace said.

Epilogue

21st July 1827, Hythe, Kent

Ann ran the bolts across the door, closing the inn for the night. Carrying a tallow candle in her hand, she walked slowly around the bar, extinguishing those candles affixed to the walls, leaving just the dying fire in the hearth. She exhaled as she climbed the stairs, and at the top, she paused outside of William’s room and listened for a moment to his soft wheezy breathing. She smiled and continued into her bedroom, where she placed the candle on the table beside her bed, the light illuminating the letter which had arrived that morning. With a sigh, she picked it up and re-read it. ‘My dearest Ann, I have found decent lodgings in the city—it be such a different place what can’t even be described. I have found work in a gentlemen’s stables, earning a decent wage. Ann, I beg you again to bring William and come and join me out here. Nobody knows nobody and asks no questions. There be folk here from all around the world. We could be having such a life here—man, wife and son. Think proper on it, Ann. Could I be asking another question of you, my dear Ann? Before the Great Trial you be saying that the barrels of guineas did exist, but they be long gone. Where do they be and how do you be knowing it for certain-sure? I will close now, dear Ann and say again my desire for you and William to be coming here. Your loving Sam.’

Ann stared at the letter, which, judging by the handwriting and some choices of words, Sam had clearly asked somebody else to write for him, wondering how she would respond. The answer to the first part—his offer for her to go out to him in Chicago—was easy: there was no way such a thing was going to happen. She felt reciprocal feelings for him and, were that the end of the matter, she might well have gone to him. What she had here, though, her own life and business, was too much to surrender. That, coupled with the secret buried in the fireplace, which she could not risk anyone discovering, made the decision firmer in her mind. Ann also knew that part of Sam’s desire for them to join him stemmed from his believing that he was William’s father, something which, from the child’s appearance of late, she now doubted very strongly. Her actions and the effects of smuggling would forever hold her in the Old World, whilst Sam had a fresh start in the New World.

And what could she say to the second part of his letter, about the guineas? That she had known of their location since 1821? When, in his feverish delirium, Sam had told her and Hester that they had been buried beneath Widow Stewart’s pigpen, something which Ann had dismissed at the time as the fantasy of a hallucinating mind. It had only been by chance on the night of the arrests that Ann had seen Hester appearing from the outbuilding at the rear of Braemar Cottage, carrying a handful of gold guineas. Ann had realised that at some point—and God only knew how—Hester had found them and had had them moved to Braemar Cottage. Ann had slipped unnoticed into the outbuilding, discovering two barrels beneath the floor, one entirely empty, the other with just a thin scattering remaining. Ann had taken two coins of her own, as evidence: one she had thrown at Hester; the other she now looked at on the table beside her bed.

She would write a letter to Sam in the morning, but she knew somehow that she would never post it.

She blew out the candle, picked up the guinea and lay on her bed, turning it over repeatedly, wondering at what might have been.

Historical Information

I had known for a number of years that a story about smuggling—so intrinsically linked to the counties of Kent and Sussex, in which this series is set—would be an inevitable addition. Having undertaken some basic research into the various smuggling gangs in operation in