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‘If it’s called Our Lady, I’m assuming it’s Catholic?’
‘Of course,’ says Cathbad. Somehow, he’d never thought of attending any other sort of service.
‘I’d like to say a prayer for Emily too,’ he says, after a moment’s silence.
Judy loses her quizzical look. Cathbad knows that she wants to ask more about Emily but she’s aware that it’s a sensitive subject. Cathbad assumes that she won’t be part of the investigation because of his own involvement in the case. After all these years, he’s still a bit vague about police procedure.
‘OK,’ says Judy. ‘It’ll be something different anyway. We’re going to church,’ she tells Michael and Miranda.
‘Will there be sweets?’ says Miranda. ‘We went once before and there were sweets.’
‘That was Easter,’ says Michael. ‘There are only sweets at Easter.’
Cathbad tries to remember when the children had attended a church at Easter. There was one occasion, after the murders in Walsingham, but Miranda had been a baby then. Maybe Judy’s parents took them one year.
‘We’ll get ice creams after mass,’ says Judy.
Cathbad notes that she’s still a Catholic at heart. It was one of the first things he learnt when he moved to England. Only RCs talk about ‘mass’.
Ruth and Kate are also eating ice creams. They are having a day out in Lincoln with Zoe. It’s where Zoe was brought up and Ruth had once expressed a desire to see the castle. So they are now in the old part of the town, with the cathedral on one side and the castle on the other. In front of them is a beautiful bookshop, Lindum Books, all crooked beams and bay windows, like something from a fairy tale. Ruth feels as if she has found her spiritual home. Well, one of them anyway.
It’s good to get away from death and bones for a while. And from Nelson. He’d wanted to spend Sunday with them. When Ruth told him that she was going to Lincoln with Zoe, Nelson had said ‘Lincoln?’ rather sharply. ‘Why not?’ asked Ruth. ‘What’s wrong with Lincoln?’ Nelson hadn’t answered. Ruth thinks that he’s still rather ambivalent about Zoe.
They finish their ice creams and walk through the gateway into the castle grounds. ‘It’s fascinating,’ says Zoe. ‘You can walk around the walls and look in the towers. There was a prison here in Victorian times too. It’s very spooky.’
It seems that Ruth is not that far away from death and bones after all. She thinks of the girl whose body she excavated yesterday. There’s something very medieval about being bricked up behind a wall, a barbaric punishment usually reserved for erring women, nuns who broke their vows, women who deceived their husbands. Didn’t George I have his wife’s lover bricked up?
Zoe is thrilled to have the chance to be their guide. ‘I used to come here with my mum and dad when I was young,’ she says, as they climb the steps to the ramparts. ‘The guidebooks go on about the Magna Carta but that’s really very dull. Just a piece of parchment. I loved the story about Lady Nicola de la Haye. She was the constable here and she defended the castle when it was besieged by Richard I’s men. She held out for over a month.’
‘Was she on King John’s side then?’ asks Ruth. She knows that her view of John as a fool and possible child-murderer has been influenced by that less-than-accurate historian Shakespeare.
‘Yes, she was. And she defended the castle from the French later on.’
‘Was that when they wanted to put Louis on the throne?’ says Ruth. ‘He’s always left out of the history books, but I think he was actually proclaimed King of England.’
‘That was the barons,’ says Zoe. ‘John always had trouble with the barons. But Nicola held Lincoln Castle for King John. She must have been quite a woman. She lived here until she died in her seventies. My mum almost named me Nicola because of her.’
But in the end Zoe’s adoptive parents had kept the name that her birth mother– Ruth’s mother– had given her. Dawn. Zoe herself changed it later.
‘Was your mum keen on history?’ asks Ruth. She knows that Zoe loved her adoptive parents, who both died some years ago, but she rarely talks about them.
‘Yes, she was,’ says Zoe. ‘I think, in a different time, she might have gone to university but she left school at sixteen and went to secretarial college. She loved historical romances– Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy– and she loved people like Nicola. Strong women.’
‘I remember going to Eltham Palace with my mum,ourmother,’ says Ruth. ‘It’s all Art Deco inside now– really beautiful but a bit strange. There’s not much left of the Tudor part. But I could never get over the fact that Henry VIII had grown up there, almost next door to me. I think that’s what first got me interested in the past. That and Georgette Heyer.’
‘Did Jean– our mum– like history too?’
‘She would never have said so,’ says Ruth. ‘She didn’t want me to study archaeology. She wanted me to do something useful like accountancy. But I suppose she must have had some interest because she was the one who took us to Eltham Palace. Not Dad.’
Ruth would like her father to meet Zoe but so far he has resisted doing so. She resolves to bring the matter up again on her next visit to see him in London. Zoe has such a wistful look on her face when she talks about their mother Jean. Ruth thinks that seeing the house in Eltham would bring her closer to the birth mother she never met. Maybe they could visit the Art Deco palace too.
Kate has run further along the wall and now comes back to hurry them along. Ruth walks behind, enjoying listening to Kate talking to her aunt. Zoe’s stories seem to owe quite a lot to her imagination but Ruth is happy to let her own thoughts drift. She welcomes spending the day in the early Middle Ages. It stops her thinking too much about her own middle age and whether she wants to spend it with Nelson.
It’s the more modern part of the castle that shakes her. The Victorian prison was run according to the separate system, something that Ruth first encountered during a dig at Norwich Castle. That was when they uncovered the bones of a Victorian murderess called Mother Hook, a case that had led to the TV programmeWomen Who Killand Ruth’s association with Frank. Ruth can hear his mellow American voice now. ‘The separate system was a way of keeping prisoners completely isolated. . . They had to wear masks at all times. . . The idea was to stop criminals consorting with other criminals. . . but, of course, there was a major drawback.’ ‘What was that?’ Ruth remembers asking. ‘They went mad,’ Frank told her.
Zoe’s tour takes them into the prison chapel which has recreated the seats, like horse stalls, that prevented inmates from seeing anything other than the (presumably hellfire) preacher. The museum has added the grisly finishing touch of a coffin on a trestle table. Ruth thinks of last year, during the fiercest lockdown, the hospital patients dying alone, their loved ones forbidden from visiting them. She doesn’t think she has ever been in a sadder room.
‘I don’t like this bit,’ says Kate. ‘Can we go and see the Magna thing?’
