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Chapter Four

They ran. The rain was pelting down now, carried in gusts by the wind, as the path led them away from the pebbly beach and between the rocks to the cottage. Ben creaked open the gate in the little picket fence, and they hurried to the door. He unlocked it and showed her inside.

Kristen stood shivering and dripping on the bare floorboards. ‘I’m like a drowned rat.’ She took off her fleecy top, which was wet through. Her bare arms were mottled with cold.

‘Here,’ Ben said, pulling a wooden chair out from the table. He hung the fleece over the back of it. ‘This’ll dry off fine once I get the fire going.’ He’d prepared it earlier, split logs and kindling sticks on a bed of balled-up newspaper.

Kristen checked inside her bag. ‘Thank God, my stuff didn’t get wet.’ As she slung the bag over the back of the chair, Ben motioned towards the narrow wooden staircase. ‘You’d best get yourself dried off. There’s towels and a hair dryer in the bathroom.’

As Kristen trotted upstairs, he knelt by the fireplace and used his Zippo to light the paper and kindling. By the time she returned a few minutes later, her short hair frizzy from the dryer, he had a crackling blaze going and the cottage was already filling with a glow of warmth.

‘What a lovely little place,’ she said, now that she could admire it.

‘Back when I had the big house, this was just a derelict fisherman’s bothy, no more than four walls and half a roof. I used to shelter in it sometimes when I was out running and it began to rain. Good to see it all done up.’ He walked over to the old oak dresser by the window and picked up a half-finished bottle of whisky. ‘Would you like a drink? Afraid all I have is this stuff.’

‘Laphroaig single malt, ten years old. Very nice,’ Kristen commented. Then, noticing the case of identical bottles sitting on the floor next to the dresser, she added, ‘You must be a bit of a connoisseur.’

‘That’s a nice way of putting it,’ he said with a sour chuckle, and poured out two measures in a pair of chunky cut-glass tumblers.

‘I shouldn’t. Whisky always goes right to my head. But what the hell.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ he said. ‘This will warm the cockles of your heart.’

‘I always wondered which bit of the human heart the cockles were,’ she mused, accepting the tumbler. ‘Next time I meet a cardiologist, I must remember to ask. Cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ They clinked. The fireplace had a brass surround with a single padded seat on either side. They sat opposite one another, in the glow of the crackling flames.

At her first sip, Kristen spluttered. ‘Jesus.’

‘It’s cask strength,’ he said. ‘Fifty-five per cent proof.’

‘The strong stuff.’

‘You get used to it.’

‘I wouldn’t want to get too used to it,’ she laughed, then took another sip. ‘I can feel those cockles warming up already.’

Ben was beginning to appreciate the company now. It felt good to have someone to relate to again after long weeks of being very alone. He was glad he hadn’t turned Kristen away when she’d approached him on the beach.

‘So what is it you do, Ben?’

‘Right now, nothing.’

‘You certainly are the mysterious one. No family, no home, no future plans, and now no occupation either.’

It was his instinct to be evasive when being questioned. ‘Let’s just say I’m kind of between things,’ he said. ‘Considering my options.’

‘What did you do before? Or would I be prying?’

He knew there was a limit to the whole Mr Mystery bit. Any more, and he risked putting out alarming signals. He didn’t want to come over as a weirdo or a serial killer. It was time to open up a little with her. ‘I was in the military for a while. Then I left to start up in business for myself.’

‘You don’t strike me as the businessman type,’ she said, laughing.

‘It was a particular kind of business.’ His tumbler was empty again. He refilled it once more and topped hers up too. She was drinking much less quickly than he was.

‘Now you really have me intrigued. Remember you’re dealing with a nosy journalist.’ She grinned, pointing a jokey finger at him. ‘I can get information out of a stone.’

‘Really?’

‘Famous for it.’

‘Fair enough. I helped people.’

‘People?’

‘People in trouble. And people whose loved ones were in trouble.’

‘Now we’re really getting somewhere. Helped them how?’

‘By bringing the loved ones home safely,’ he replied.

‘You’re talking about missing persons?’

‘Kidnap cases, mostly.’

‘Wouldn’t the police normally deal with that kind of thing?’

‘In theory,’ he said. ‘But when clients begin to see how badly things can get botched up by going down that road, they’ll often turn to the freelancers.’

‘That’s what you were, a freelancer?’

‘The term was “crisis response consultant”. I worked alone.’

‘And did what exactly?’

‘Whatever was required,’ he said.

She sipped a little more whisky, getting acclimatised to the burn now, staring at him intently over the rim of her glass. ‘Sounds like a risky business.’

‘It had its moments. I was trained for it.’ He reached for another log from the neat stack by the fire, and lobbed it into the flames. The blaze crackled up with a shower of orange sparks.

‘Sounds like you enjoyed the danger,’ Kristen said. ‘Some people are attracted to it. Even thrive on it.’

‘Funny. That’s what Brooke said, too.’

‘Brooke?’

‘My fiancée. I should say, ex-fiancée. We split up a couple of months ago.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Well, no, it isn’t.’

‘I know how it goes, believe me.’

‘You too?’

She nodded. ‘We’d been together three years. I thought it would last forever, you know?’

‘That’s what I thought, too,’ he said. ‘That Brooke and I were for life. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you planned.’

‘You never know what life’s going to set in your path,’ she said, with a one-sided smile.

‘I miss her. There’s not an hour I don’t think about her.’

‘What’s she like?’ Kristen asked.

Ben paused a long time before replying. ‘What can I say? She was the morning of my day.’

‘My God,’ Kristen coughed.

He looked at her. ‘What?’

‘I can only wish that, one day, a man will say something that beautiful about me. I think I just met the last of the real romantics.’

He smiled darkly. ‘I’ve been called a lot of things, but that’s a new one.’

‘Here, give me another drop of that stuff, will you?’ she said, proffering her empty glass.

Ben found it strange that he should be confiding like this in a stranger. Whisky and loneliness made for a powerful cocktail. A little too powerful. He hadn’t eaten much that day, and with all the Guinness inside him already, he was feeling uncharacte‌ristically light-headed. He poured another measure for Kristen. He knew he needed to stop topping up his own drink, but topped it up anyway.

‘So what about this book of yours that you’re thinking of giving up on?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time. Nobody’s ever done a proper biography of Lady Stamford before. I’ve spent the last eight months travelling back and forth researching everything about her life, both here in Ireland and after she returned to England. Which is what I’ll be doing myself tomorrow.’

Ben looked at her and found himself smiling. She was attractive, she was warm and engaging. Under any other circumstances, a man might have felt a pang of disappointment that she’d be gone the next day. A new female attachment was the last thing Ben was looking for at this point in his life, but he was still sorry that he was going to lose an interesting companion. He shoved all those thoughts to the back of his mind.

‘Eight months is a lot of time to spend on research, just to give up on it,’ he said. ‘What happened, did you lose interest?’

‘Not at all. Lady Stamford’s is a fascinating story.’

‘Tell me some of it.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.’

Kristen shrugged. ‘She was born Elizabeth Manners in Bath in 1824. Just turned nineteen when she met her soon-to-be husband, Lord Edgar Stamford. He was only two years older than her, but already well known as a botanist and chemist. He’d inherited the family fortune very young. Massively rich, dashing and handsome, whisked her off her feet and brought her to Ireland. It wasn’t exactly the happiest of marriages. She soon found out that Stamford was a controlling despot of a man who treated everyone around him like filth.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘They’re not wrong. Total bastard wouldn’t be too much of an understatement. As lord of the manor he was also a Justice of the Peace, which in rural Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century basically allowed him to play God with the peasant farmers who worked on his lands. They had a pretty rough existence under his rule. Then when the Great Famine struck the land hard in 1847, things got worse for them. A lot worse.’

Ben was no historian, but he had a fairly clear idea of what Kristen was talking about. It wasn’t possible to live in Ireland for any length of time, or for that matter to have had an Irish mother, without picking up a few of the key facts about one of the defining moments, and quite possibly the darkest hour, of the country’s history.

‘Bad time,’ he said. ‘About a million dead from starvation. They’d become too dependent on the potato for food. When the blight wiped out the crop, they didn’t stand much of a chance.’

‘More like anything up to two million, by some estimates,’ Kristen corrected him. ‘That’s out of an overall population at the time of just eight million. Compare those figures to the famine in Darfur in 2003: a hundred thousand dead out of a population of twenty-seven million. We tend to forget nowadays how bad things got here. Irish people died like flies. Heaped in mass graves, sometimes while they were still alive but too weak from starvation to protest. Starvation was everywhere. Yet if Lord Stamford caught one of his hungry tenants stealing so much as an apple to feed their children, he’d have them strung up.’

‘Sounds like a nice guy to be married to.’

‘It was a wretched time for her. Women couldn’t just walk away from an abusive relationship in those days. Husbands had complete control over everything. Marital rape was legal; men could basically do what they wanted. I’m sure Edgar Stamford exploited that freedom to the nines, though I can’t prove it without the journals.’

‘Journals?’

‘She kept a private diary during her years in Ireland, several volumes long. They’d have been a key resource for me, if I’d been able to get hold of them.’

‘They were lost?’ Ben asked.

Kristen shook her head. ‘I finally tracked them down to this former academic who has them now, a private collector specialising in Irish history. Tried to persuade him to let me view them, but I’m still waiting for him to get back to me.’

‘Pity.’

‘Anyway,’ Kristen said, ‘we know a lot about her married life from her later writings and personal letters, some of which I managed to get hold of.’

‘Did she leave Ireland after her husband died?’

‘No, he died later. She had eight years of hell with him and then managed to escape back to England with a little help from sympathisers. That was when her life really began. She campaigned for women’s rights, published a couple of volumes of poetry and a successful novel, and founded a school to help educate underprivileged girls and young women.’

‘Sounds like a happy ending, for her at least,’ Ben said.

‘Sadly not. The good times didn’t last long. I’ve got some of her personal letters that suggest she got herself mired in some kind of legal action in the late summer of 1851, though it’s all a bit of a mystery. From what I managed to piece together, Elizabeth made contact with one Sir Abraham Barnstable, who was one of the very top lawyers in London at the time and a bit of a shadowy figure.’

‘Shadowy how?’

She shrugged. ‘Government connections. Some have said he was a spy. What she was in touch with him for, nobody knows, because then the Gilbert Drummond thing happened and—’

‘You’re losing me completely.’

‘Sorry. Gilbert Drummond was a new teacher Elizabeth had hired to work at her school that July. He was twenty-six, handsome, dashing, but volatile. The story goes that he fell obsessively in love with her, and in September he finally declared his passion for her. When Elizabeth rejected him, he became convinced she was in love with someone else, went off in a rage and got a horse pistol … and you can guess the rest.’